


in between the stars

by belladonna_ink



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artist Keith (Voltron), Bilingual Lance (Voltron), Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Courting Rituals, Cuban Lance (Voltron), Dancer Lance (Voltron), Diplomacy, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Flirting, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gay Keith (Voltron), Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Homesick Lance (Voltron), I FIXED IT MOSTLY, I JUST WANT HIM TO BE APPRECIATED AND HAPPY SO I DID THIS TO MAKE CANON RIGHT, Insecure Lance (Voltron), Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Korean Keith (Voltron), Lance (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron) Has ADHD, Lance (Voltron)-centric, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Mutual Pining, Nonbinary Pidge | Katie Holt, Oblivious Lance (Voltron), PRETTY CLICHE BUT IT MAKES ME SMILE, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pining Lance (Voltron), Sniper Lance (Voltron), Various Alien Characters, but he’s in denial for a while so, dunno if it’s mentioned but it’s there, dw it doesn’t happen, except plot twist it’s 5+1 twice, for many reasons, forgot this bit wait, haha i’m these kinds of trash specifically, i will make canon crumble before my throne, i’m not an expert with mental health don’t come for me, i’ve done it before and i want to fix any mistakes, mentions of ADHD, mentions of depression, most of which i will not disclose, my throne of fix it fanfiction, please tell me if i accidentally mess them up, there, this is one of the most self-indulgent fics you’ll ever see, you’re gonna have to suspend your disbelief for this au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25368268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belladonna_ink/pseuds/belladonna_ink
Summary: Lance knows what he is.A goofball, dumb as rocks, arrogant, rude, flirtatious, egoistical, reckless, overconfident, dramatic, and despite his best efforts, unattractive.Does he even have any redeeming qualities?—Keith knows what Lance is.A goofball. Arrogant, flirtatious, egoistical, reckless, confident, energetic, bright, caring, diplomatic, talented, kind, attractive-No! Keith doesn’t find Lance attractive. He doesn’t.Not even a little bit...—I believe that sometimes, we need to step back and look at things from a new perspective. This is Keith, taking a step back, and the waves that follow him.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 55
Kudos: 169





	1. from me to you (the distance that binds me)

**Author's Note:**

> as the tags said, suspend your disbelief for this au.
> 
> in this au lotor didn’t like, harvest the quintessence from the colony i guess. and lotor just doesn’t exist bc it’s easier like that. just pretend the clone didn’t have to do with lotor. and so keith and his mom never found that. and also the clone shiro was found out before keith came back, and they got back real shiro already somehow, just pretend that this works out.
> 
> i just want to write the fic with these specific versions of them and not deal with the actual plot, for… reasons. i don’t want to Plot, i want to Pine.
> 
> basically i want lance to have missed keith, and to have a bi crisis over keith being all hot now, but also for keith to have a reason to be more mature and see lance with new eyes. i may have made a lot of adjustments to the canon timeline to do so.
> 
> then again, it could do with some adjusting.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance monologues. There is something to being second-best that itches at him, and there’s one reason that makes sense to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, forgot to mention that italics in parentheses are thoughts lance doesn’t want to admit to having. things he thinks, but he wants to be in denial about. it’s like that for the rest of the story too, so keep that in mind.

_The wheels on the giant telepathic alien space lions go round and round, round and round, round and round…_

_The wheels on the giant telepathic alien space lions go round and round, aaaaaall daaaaaaay looooong…_

If it wasn’t obvious, Lance is bored. Has been for a while.

Staring at the ceiling, idly spinning his headphone’s unplugged wire in his left hand with the silent headphones still resting on his head, waiting for what’s next. Waiting for the next mission, for somebody to want his company, for a sign. Is he here to wait? For what?

Or maybe he’s just there to be there, however lesser he might be in comparison to the perfect candidate. The perfect paladin. Perhaps he is the round peg in a square hole. A fit, perhaps; but for how long? Until the square peg comes around?

Lance pulls words from his head in a way that he finds others do not. And by that, he means that he doesn’t at all.

They don’t come to him, they just don’t follow the stream of his thoughts. He thinks in concepts, in ideas, in what-could-be and what-should’ve-been, and he thinks that maybe the concept half of his thoughts are why he connects with his lion so well. Well… lions. Either way, his mind was built and structured in a way that they clearly found easy to navigate, as Blue had told him, through her unique concepts and ideas. Images, almost.

Speaking of Blue, he’s happier than ever as the moment to be behind her wheel (metaphorically). Because regardless of how amazing Red was, and how fast she was, Blue was still his favorite, and he knew Red would not begrudge him that sentiment. After all, Keith was still her favorite too. _And how pathetic was that mutual sadness?_

… Anyways.

When he does speak, his head is a jumble of _whatwhatwhatthatsnotrightwhatisitquénocomprendolapreguntalosientolosientolosiento,_ and if he doesn’t filter that, he never gets past the first interaction. He has to translate everything he thinks.

From concept to Spanish to English, from dust to dust to dust. An elongated, useless cycle that leaves him constantly clutching at straws and desperately trying to get it right, or just be fast enough. _Wait, it’s grasping at straws, not clutching… Or was it? Does it matter? Is there a difference? Whatever. I don’t care anyways._

And it is so much easier not to care, isn’t it?

Lance plays music loud enough that he never has to hear the quiet in his room, or the companionable silence between Hunk and Pidge working side-by-side while he wasn’t welcome, listened to, or encouraged to be in the room with them ( _although, he had thought they were a trio? The original three from the Garrison put together in the simulations, a team that became part of a team, but no, they paired up and Keith and Shiro paired up and Coran spent time with Allura and cleaning, and he was friends with everyone so he wasn’t really special, and Allura spent her time with the mice and Coran and Shiro when Keith was training but what was he? Where was his place in the cycle, in the routine, in the system? Where was he given anything more than charity, pity, anything more than a participation award?_ )

And he avoids the training area in the daytime, even though Keith is back now, because even if someone is in it the room feels too empty ( _the castle feels too empty_ ), and he can’t help Allura or Shiro. He’s been told he’s not a great diplomat, which is, considering his track record, a fair assessment. He’s no longer allowed on exclusively diplomacy missions, and when it’s battle and diplomacy, he’s never left alone. They hadn’t told him that last part, but he’d figured. ( _They think he’s stupid. Really? It’s not that subtle. Anywhere else they never talk to him, but during those missions he’s always occupied in one way or another, mostly by Hunk. He would say it’s degrading, but he knows he’s not to be trusted that much anyways. At least, not with important things._ )

But he’s fine. He’s managing. He cleans the castle with Coran, and listens to all his stories, and he does the team building exercises with everybody, and he puts Pidge to bed and helps Hunk go back to bed after his midnight snack, and tries to make sure Shiro is sleeping, that Allura wasn’t awake and planning, working, or just lying awake, and that Keith wasn’t overworking himself and/or not sleeping. Even Coran becomes subject to his mothering, during the more difficult times.

He tries to take care of them, tries to lighten the mood when it’s getting too serious and the atmosphere is thick with thinly veiled tension ( _he is the one scowled at, but is it that much of a tragedy if they’re still a functioning team? He can give up some small comforts, like compliments and being smiled at and being cared for by others. It’s for the universe. It’s for his friends. No matter what they do or don’t do for him._

_… He sort of wishes they would smile at him again._

_Is that too much to ask?)_.

And he trains at night, when Keith wasn’t hogging the training deck and when he can suspend the belief that Keith’s old self didn’t once practically live in the room. ( _Keith isn’t the same. He isn’t. Lance never gets to talk to him anymore, and they’re so close, but he feels like he wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap by stretching out a hand, like he’s somewhere else, worlds apart from Lance despite how he’d thought they had had something together, once upon a time._

_When he’d had courage, and the ability to deny himself more from Keith. But he wants to hold his hand, and have Keith want him back, and he wants to make a life with him._

_He wants to watch him wake up with his hair all messy like he always looks in the morning, and own two dogs since they both love dogs, and a stupidly big and comfy sofa with useless decorative throw pillows so they could watch all the movies Keith had missed out on, and have a pillow fight or build a fort, and have Taco Tuesdays, and extravagant Christmases, and buy all the half-price Valentine’s day chocolate the day after Valentine’s day and get sick afterwards, and get Keith a collection of pretty knives one day to see how happy he would be, and play the cheesy songs they pretended to hate but they both loved and belt them at three in the morning and get a noise complaint from the neighbors, and see Keith draw all the time and get him the fancy supplies he’s always wanted, and have Keith smile at him at least once a day or maybe less than that, he can still deal with less, and he wants Keith to be happy, and to eat bad Chinese takeout when they’re both too lazy to eat, and have Keith love him, and._

_All these impossible, amazing things, so much more than he could ask for and yet so much less than he had ever wanted before he had known love, before he had known it would be enough, and that anything close to it would be worth all the pain from the burnt hands he gotten reaching out for a drop of it. Love, an impossible endeavor; brighter than the pinprick suns in the sky around him, and yet just as unreachable. He’s been hurt before, but he had never before wanted to stay despite the sting. Somehow, even the sight of Keith was the aloe that kept him in the position to be burned._

_And somehow, he didn’t regret it_.)

He talks to the mice about all his woes with Allura ( _and sometimes Keith, when he’s desperate enough. Allura may have been a flame, but Keith has always been and always will be a wildfire. She was a friend, but Keith kept him up at night when he wasn’t even around_ ), and he’s a part of the team. A piece in a unit. A cog in the machine.

And yet… He wonders if he may have been an afterthought of an addition. An spare key that doesn’t work unless you jiggle it in the lock just right, that scratchy fleece-type blanket with ribbon around the border that for some reason exists in every house and hotel, the fifth-favorite ice cream at Baskin-Robbins useful only for extra samples, chosen only because all the others are out. Something vaguely useful, but only a replacement. Or a stand-in, not hated, but the least favorite, by far. Better as…

He doesn’t want to say cannon fodder, a foot soldier is a better term, but that’s what it is. A number, not really a name. A grunt, but not a high ranking one.

Lance’s losing sleep every day, talking less and less, dragging his feet along the floor whenever he walks, only looking at the tops of his shoes unless he’s addressed directly. He can’t force himself to talk to other people sometimes. He’s too _tired._ It doesn’t seem worth it, to him, until he tries to remind himself of his friends. His family.

He doesn’t want to not come home with everyone else, and have them all know that he wasn’t strong enough without them, and to have them cry over him. And he doesn’t want his friends to have to deal with him being gone, even if they didn’t really like him; death is always traumatic, when in close quarters with the person. He is _not_ going to be that catalyst to make Pidge overwork themself, or Keith train too much, or Allura get mad and stressed and grieve all the time, or Hunk get too nervous and depressed, or Shiro never sleep, or Coran feel unappreciated. He is not going to make anyone feel guilty. Su-...

Dying is the most selfish thing you can do.

No matter how useless you feel alive.

His mama had drilled that into his head for a long time, after he was diagnosed with clinical depression, just like his aunt, her sister.

His aunt he’d never had the chance to meet.

So Lance is needed, yes, but he was never the first choice, and never the first one to do something. He was just… there. ( _Maybe it would be better if he had no personality at all. Nobody would be bothered by him all that much anymore. Was that selfish of him?_ )

It’s always Keith first, and then _he_ is a fighter pilot, and then _he_ becomes the Red Paladin, and then _he_ gets a sword, so on and so on. A really bad copy-paste job. Only so long can he be labeled as ‘Second to Keith’ before he starts to get a bit frazzled.

He wasn’t the only one who could pilot Blue or Red, although that was a given after Shiro’s second performance of a universe-wide Carmen Sandiego/Where’s Waldo stunt. Even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been a very smart thing for the lions, practically; there’s no way that they could’ve only have one single paladin forever. Some would die, some would retire, some would simply… violently meander into the astral plane somehow, which could fit into that first category. And the lions used to have different paladins, before Alfor and his group, according to Coran’s stories. They had been switched around a couple times before.

And now, for some reason, he spends his time without a real hobby, only taking care of their little family, and their little family has gone straight downhill. Or had it ever been a family? Who knows. Shiro went missing, and came back as a clone, and Keith ran off with his mom and the Braid of Marmite, the Bowl of Marijuana, the Bake of Menorah, before he was called back, after they had found out Shiro was a clone and dumped him into space, out the airlock, before he could hurt anybody.

And Keith had kinda gone on a spontaneous soul-searching time travelling journey with his mom, although discovering nothing important to anybody else, and now he was like, two or three years older. Ridiculous. And plus, he was like three inches taller than Lance, and cooler and bigger and more grizzled and-

Anyways. So, they weren’t irreplaceable.

But, in the comfort of his own room, surrounded by quiet and tucked up in bed, he could look at himself as something like that one piece of code that Pidge had once ranted about. They had tugged at their hair, growling at the computer for offending them, mumbling just beneath their breath…

“It’s so stupid.”

Lance was sitting criss-cross applesauce on a spare office-spinning type of chair, with Hunk tinkering idly in the background. He had banned Lance from being within the vicinity while he worked, claiming it was bad luck. Lance wasn’t inclined to disagree, after five separate accidents with him in the area. He just thanks whatever deities were present that he still has his eyes.

He was just watching Pidge work, a rare opportunity. Lance was just so bored, all the time, and he had gone to visit Team Punk, after having sworn to not tease, provoke, flirt with, joke with, or otherwise bother anybody that day, even a little.

As a result, he was vibrating with unreleased energy, tapping his foot incessantly; and despite it, he was still filled with wonder and curiosity and admiration. It was really incredible what these two could make. ( _There had been five separate arguments that day alone, too. Allura still isn’t very happy with Hunk and Pidge, and Keith doesn’t like Allura all that much now either, although that may be for unrelated reasons._

_Lance hadn’t been scowled at the whole day._

_He also hadn’t been looked at._ )

He watched with raised eyebrows as Pidge furiously tapped a series of keys on the computer, hunched over it, a dragon over its hoard. Or a gremlin, perhaps. They were teetering on the edge of their seat, just a few centimeters away from falling right off. It made Lance’s uncle senses itch to tell them to just _sit back a little, please,_ but that would count as bothering, and he wanted to know what was so stupid.

“It’s so stupid, so stupid, I, I just-“ Pidge pressed the backspace button again, and threw their hands up in the air, falling backwards into their chair, finally. Lance privately breathed a sigh of relief. “Argh!”

“What is it?” Lance had leaned over to catch a glimpse of the screen, but only caught indecipherable code jargon. Of course, though, it was only indecipherable to him. Hunk would’ve been able to figure it out in a few seconds.

“Just this… this stupid line of code! It’s happened before, it’s a common kinda thing, but there’s just this useless piece of code. I can’t take it out, or it’ll crash the system, but it does nothing if I leave it in. I can’t get rid of it, but it’s so stupid!” Pidge hit the enter button and sighed in defeat, rubbing their eyes. Lance tilted his head in confusion, but there was no further explanation.

Pidge pinched the bridge of their nose. They sat in silence for a second, before Lance saw a glint in their eyes. They smirked in sudden glee, as their glasses did the intimidating anime glasses thing - Lance maybe watched a lot of anime before they left Earth - and snickered. “Reminds me of somebody else I know.” _Wha- I-_

Lance turned red, and shoved their shoulder with both hands while they laughed at his offense. Rude!

“Shut up!” he shrieked, pausing when Hunk turned for a moment and shushed him. Seriously? Does anybody take him seriously?

He continues in a quieter voice, “I am not stupid! I got into the Garrison on scholarships only! I’ll let you know that I am one of the smartest-“

“Oh yeah?” Pidge interrupted. “What are... the first five digits of pi?”

“I-“ he started, raising a finger, and then blanked. _3.14… Circumference over diameter…_ “I, um, just shut up!” They kept laughing, and Lance sunk into his chair. He was _not_ stupid, he was- he was…

Well…

A machine beeped somewhere to the far left, and Pidge scowled. “Goddamnit, shut up, you,” they shouted back. Lance turned even redder.

“Language!” he yelled. Instinct, after growing up with a strict Catholic family. He wasn’t super religious, but his mama had always told him how bad swearing was, and… he really was turning into his mother, wasn’t he?

Really, though, he didn’t know most curses anyways. He still vividly remembered the silence reigning over the table at Christmas dinner, after his grandma had yelled out the same curse word Pidge had used when she had stubbed her toe on the leg of her chair. The constipated look on his mama’s face had been golden.

“You shut up too, I’m not a little kid.”

He threw a paper back at their face in retort. It had almost broken into an actual paper fight, but once again, Hunk stopped it from getting out of control. Party pooper.

( _Despite the fun he’d had that day watching them work, he didn’t think it was worth all the fighting throughout the castle._

_He never did it again._ )

It was an apt metaphor. A minor glitch, almost. Unremovable, but not worth anything.

Because really, honestly, truthfully, he’s the only one who could be like that, out of them all. If somebody were to put the team on a line-up and were to pick the least worthy one, he knows who would be the first to go. There was always one.

And honestly, he had been that one too many times. At school, at home, at any clubs he ever joined, any hobbies. Things didn’t come natural to him like they did to other people. He didn’t really have a ‘thing’, like his oldest sister’s painting, his second oldest brother’s music, his third oldest sister’s athleticism, his cousin’s… mathleticism. (Lance has attended far too many mathlete competitions for his liking.) Like Keith’s piloting and fighting skills, Pidge’s computers, Hunk’s cooking and engineering.

Just… he had never anticipated being ‘that one’ in a group of people meant to save the universe.

Shiro was the obvious leader. He was strong, he was smart and good with tactics, with people, and he was a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield, whether behind the plans or on the frontlines. He was valuable, undeniably so.

And there was Hunk, the intelligent, caring engineer. Firstly, he was smart, and secondly, without him the team would fall apart. Without his cooking, the life he brought to the team, the ideas and thoughtfulness… He was valuable, and it wasn’t debatable.

Pidge was mostly known for being a genius, really, and that was what they brought to the team, a whip-smart hacker with passion and willpower. They were bright and helpful, and although it was rarely mentioned, somebody who really cared about others. They would cross the universe to save their family. They were valuable, and nobody could argue with it.

And then there was Keith... Keith, the fighter, the passionate and motivated half-Galran samurai with a mullet, the heart of the team. Strong, stubborn, an incredibly hardworking and loyal teammate, to a fault. Like Pidge, he would do anything for those he cared about, and like Shiro, he was insane on the battlefield, and in general he brought them together. It wouldn’t work without him. He was valuable, and everyone knew it.

Allura. The princess of a demolished planet, with magic, willpower, and vengeance for her people. A tactician, a diplomat, a co-leader, a fighter even, and overall a caring, good person. She was valuable, and that was the end of it.

And Coran! Coran was the one that kept them sane, healthy, happy, and working. Their crazy space uncle, an amazing storyteller, and an experienced war veteran who had lost his people as well. Wise, caring, and also a capable fighter. He loved his family and would do anything for them if need be. He was valuable, and anybody who disagreed could fight any and all of the paladins.

And then there was Lance. Well...

A good laugh, somebody to nag everyone to eat and sleep. A dime-a-dozen kind of person in general. A dumb flirt who thought he was the best. Entitled. Egotistical. There weren’t many people he knew who would describe him as anything more.

What would his friends say about him? Was there anybody whose first words wouldn’t be ‘a goofball’?

Confident, if confidence was the kind taught in drama club. Dramatic, if he had whined about the jagged shrapnel wound on his left leg that never got taken care of because the pods were all being used and not the paper cut he had gotten soap in while doing the dishes.

… Perhaps he didn’t understand the definition of dramatic.

He can fight, sure. Anybody could shoot if you have them a working gun. Aim didn’t matter if you had infinite ammo. He still couldn’t fight with his hands, or a sword that well, or any other weapon besides a bow and arrow. Even then, it was sketchy at best. Although he guessed he would be a good shield. It had worked before.

He tries to take care of his friends. Tries to defuse fights before they began, with distractions (normally flirting and stupid puns/jokes that were completely off topic), leaving him as the scapegoat. He wasn’t sure he was even doing that much, practically.

Smart? Well…

You just had to talk to Pidge, Keith, or anyone who had ever met him, really, for just a few minutes to come to a conclusion. He had tried before to help with battle plans, before he got sidelined in favor of Shiro’s much better ideas, and his plans weren’t that great anyways...

( _There was a flaw in the plan, like a glaring plot hole in an award-winning movie or a leak in a bucket, and he tried to point it out casually. It would leave them open to more fire than they could take, and maybe even a sneak-attack. They could be infiltrated, since their lines of defense were too weak compared to the offense lines._

_“There’s-“ He started, and was immediately met with shushes from around the room._

_One more try. “But guys, there’s-“_

_He was cut off again._

_By… Shiro._

_“Lance, we know what we’re doing. You’re not exactly a strategic master. We don’t need to be bothered right now.” Shiro spoke up. His eyebrows were drawn in, tension in his forehead, exasperation written all over his face. His breath hitched._

_He knows it was a clone, now. But then…_

_Then, it was his hero telling him to shut up so the grown-ups could talk._

_There was a sting gathering in his eyes and a lump he swallowed back in his throat, but he smiled anyways, fingerguns coming in handy (ha, hand-y finger-guns, he’s hilarious) and left them to it._

_Hunk almost got hurt on that mission. Pidge almost got hurt on that mission. Lance wasn’t so lucky._

_And then the people they were defending needed a pod, and it really wasn’t that big of a deal that he was hit in the leg, and it was fine, really._ )

And he couldn’t build anything or hack anything either. He could only be a sounding board for the smart people at times.

Attractive? He had a skin care routine he followed religiously for a reason. Besides, he had never gone on a date, had his confessions accepted, or been hit on. Or had a positive response to flirting that wasn’t manipulative. (Looking at you, Nyma.) Plus, everybody on the team seems to be good-looking anyways. Not counting Pidge, they’re too young and therefore an outlier. He kinda looks like trash next to Shiro, or Hunk, or Allura, and especially-

...

Moving on.

So of course, he had had to come to some realizations eventually, even if they were rather late in development. And he knows, with a heavy heart and something like despair painting the inside of his head, that he is possibly the most replaceable paladin to ever fly a lion.

Regardless of how Blue and Red whined and radiated protective anger, and how an indescribable sadness came over him as he had the thought, it was the reasonable conclusion.

And so he completely misses it when Keith catches on to this conclusion.

Among other things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will have chapter 2 out QUICK my friendos


	2. to speak (and to be heard)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance is a sniper, and he does his job well. Somehow, this is not universally acknowledged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you want a laugh, the outline for this chapter was as follows:
> 
> lance is a sniper and he go Shoot. he good at shoot. shoot big bad druid asshole. keith’s jaw drops and he’s like,,,,, hot damn,,,,,,,,, this boy can Shoot

“Get down!” Lance yells, and Hunk pulls the Yellow Lion into a dive on cue. However, it’s a bit too late, and he gets clipped with the tail-end of a laser, right on the left leg.

“Agh! My leg! I-I hit it on the dash, and my lion’s leg is hit, and, the leg of the paladin of the leg of Voltron and the leg of the leg of Voltron are damaged!” Hunk screams while he laughs hysterically. Comedy gold, honestly, if he could find anything funny right now, in the position they’re in.

Lance giggles anyways, with a note of fear hidden a bit conspicuously beneath it.

He steers around a series of shots barely even aimed, and he can tell how unlucky and incapable they are because they don’t even come that close to hitting him, like the Stormtrooper things in those vintage movies. Regardless, he’s filled with adrenaline, addicted to every missed target. Any missed target not involving his shooting, anyways.

He audibly makes a weird soft grunt sound while directing Blue’s laser to the left, downing an especially annoying ship that got too close to landing a shot. _Nope, nope, nope, did not sound normal, ew, ew, ew. Ugh!_

Maybe it’s just him, but personally, he really hates when he makes sounds while he’s piloting. Or just ever.

Do you ever like, just accidentally make a strange sound for no reason other than you rolled over in bed, or got your chest squished and air was forced out, or you ran up the stairs and made an ‘uh’ sound when you stopped moving? And you don’t like it or do it on purpose, but you do, and it’s not fun, because you can’t wear headphones on the bus and not feel like at any moment you can just make an odd noise?

To him, it’s weird, and he doesn’t like it when people can hear him making the reactive sounds, and just, ew. Very uncomfy feeling. Cringey.

And he doesn’t even mind when other people make noises! It’s just a self-conscious thing, not that he’s self-conscious or anything. He’s just… keeping up his good image. ( _Because he toooootally has a good image in the eyes of the team. They love him, think he’s so cool and awesome, because you have to be effortlessly cool to be awesome and they don’t think he’s narcissistic or dumb or hopeless or-_ )

Either way, he wants nobody to hear him. He doesn’t want somebody to listen in and think he’s doing something weird. His oldest cousin on his dad’s side once told him that people would think you were doing something illegal if you made weird sounds like that, and he never explicitly told him what illegal thing it was, but it was heavily implied it was really weird. Or maybe it was just that Lance didn’t know what ’whacking the weed’ meant. His grandma had laughed really hard at it, though.

Wrinkling his nose, he pushes the button on his helmet to turn off his side of the comms, without turning to look at it. Just for a while, he’ll keep it off. The others don’t really talk that much anyways, and it’s not always important stuff. If it is, they can make it so it overrides the block. He does a loop-de-loop that probably wasn’t necessary, under the guise of avoiding a Galra ship crashing into him, just to alleviate stress. Lance finds that loop-de-loops are very good at alleviating stress. And he’s actually really, super stressed right now.

There’s more Galra than there usually are on a slave ship, more defense than normal, and for a good reason. A very stupid, very annoying, very important reason that they should’ve known about long before now.

There’s a druid, on this slave ship. And the team was _just_ finding out about this.

Despite the hours of planning Allura and Shiro had put into it, the mission was going effortlessly downhill. It didn’t feel super fun. No good times were being had. No bueño. All is not good in the hood. Obama would want them to perish.

He doesn’t really know what that means. His weird grandma, the same one who laughed about whatever ‘weed-whacking’ was, said it sometimes, and whenever they asked her about it, she just said something about Gen Z. Lance didn’t really get it, but the whole family kinda left it alone. And left her alone. Grandma didn’t usually care, though, and when he asked her if she felt lonely, as he was the only one who gave her a lot of company, she said that she’d gotten used to it during the Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour. Something about grumpy gamers. He never knew what she was on about.

Blue shoves an image into his head, a rolling wave crashing down on his head, frigid water from a tap, condensation on a glass. All cold things, all a sign to focus. He’s not good at that. Why does nobody acknowledge that he has ADHD, and he isn’t on meds?

He’ll…

He’ll try anyways.

Lance rolls his shoulders, worries his lip in indecision, and then takes out a solid five of the Galra fleet, one after another.

A single ship must’ve gotten the memo that guns were meant to be aimed, because Blue’s side is struck not a moment later, a few meters away from her underbelly. Her very underprotected, much weaker underbelly.

“Agk! No, no, no!” He yanks Blue down maybe too fast, as in, he might’ve pulled a muscle in his arm, trying to cover her exposed and vulnerable underside. Thankfully, he’d silenced his comms already, so they wouldn’t have heard his reactive choked yell, but he sort of wonders why the team doesn’t ask if he’s okay. Maybe they hadn’t seen them get hit?

They don’t always talk, especially during battle, but normally there’s somebody to respond when another person’s Lion is hurt. Like with Hunk, earlier. It’s a little bit sad that they didn’t try with him…

But he’s sure it’s just a fluke.

Lance’s breath rattles in his lungs, the feeling when you hit about twenty on the Pacer Test and your ribs are aching in tandem with your legs, and he grits his teeth. Piloting a giant alien space lion is more physically exhausting than it’s made out to be.

His job right now is to get the prisoners from the main ship - the one deploying the fleets - into his Lion and go, but he’s a tad preoccupied. And he doesn’t have the time for the constant shoot-dodge-shoot-dodge routine going on. Which means his only way in is to stop attacking the ones attacking him, for now, and bypass them completely.

He really needs to get on the ship, and get the prisoners boarded on Blue, without running into this druid. It would be really really amazing if he never caught sight of them. He would love it if he never found out what they looked like, seriously. Even if he does catch them, maybe while they gazed dramatically out the window like an emo orphaned anime protagonist with either white or black hair that probably dies halfway into the fourth season, he might just pass by without trying to stop them.

Well…

He guesses he wouldn’t just _not_ take his chance to permanently incapacitate them on sight. If he were to see them. He’s an opportunist!

If he were to come across the druid, and also have the element of surprise, and not be super shaky or nervous, and not have the prisoners still with him, and have his bayard with him, and not get cold feet, and be certain that the rest of the guards wouldn’t be alerted to him being in the place, and. Well, let's just say there’s too many variables. And _yes,_ he did know that word, he had paid _some_ attention in math, _Pidge_. He didn’t spend _all_ of it staring at the back of Keith’s stupid mullet…

Or any of it! None of his time was spent staring at Keith in class. Nope. Don’t remember. Didn’t happen. Mooooooving on. Ahem.

From what he thought he kinda sorta maybe possibly knew, a druid was a bit vulnerable around their hands, because hands had something to do with symbolism and magic and whatever. Like, you needed to shoot them for them to die all the way? At least, Coran might’ve mentioned it while they cleaned the pods together. Maybe not. A head shot would be his first choice no matter what.

Still, any druid was pretty untouchable unless completely surprised, and sure they maybe hadn’t expected company at the beginning of the fight, but there’s no way they didn’t know Voltron was here now. The druid would have to have some magicky protection stuff up now, and would be practically invincible. He wouldn’t have a chance.

So. The plan would be to get the prisoners, avoid the druid, and get out _super fast._

Not a very nuanced idea, but a practical one for sure.

Blue purrs in his head, supporting this plan immensely. Lance smiles, the kind where your eyes hurt where they pull at the corners, and your face feels too small for how much you want to smile. He has a wide smile, one that his momma had told him was a handsome smile and one that a kid in middle school had told him was too big and too toothy.

He doesn’t often smile like this in front of real people these days. Blue doesn’t count. No matter how sentient she is, she isn’t human, or in an organic body, and she also wouldn’t judge him.

He had missed her being in his head as soon as she had gone, when he had had to pilot Red. She had soothed him, with calm oceans and idle streams and beautiful, gentle coral reefs, when she had let her barrier down for him again, communicating through her image-brain that she wouldn’t have had the heart to let him go if she hadn’t cut him off completely. But now they were back together, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He exhales deeply.

Now he has to actually get through this defensive wall of a Galra Empire fleet.

Military school did _not_ prepare him enough for what he has to live through everyday.

“Alright, Blue, I’m gonna do what’s called a pro gamer move,” he mumbles another his breath. Another grandma saying. And he feels it’s very fitting.

He twists, turns, and unnecessarily loop-de-loops, navigates through the many lines of the Galra fleet, _leftrightleftleftrightrightstraightrightrightleftleftup,_ and narrowly lands Blue in their aircraft hold through the top airlock. It’s left wholly devoid of aircrafts, ironically, considering the name, all hands on deck to fight Voltron. It’s only protected by a sparse spattering of the more important commanders.

They’re met with a spray of bullets before they even touch down, and the airlock opening closes on them. He doesn’t worry. He knows Blue can blast it open again.

Blue crouches and opens her mouth to let him out, when they hit the floor, and he hops out at record speed, dodging the barrage of attacks as he runs zig-zag style to get to the entrance of the main ship. The part with hallways, and rooms. The only part he needs to be in at the moment.

He morphs his bayard into his rifle, taking out a couple of soldiers on the way. Lance really does take pride in his marksmanship, and to be honest, his ego could do with some inflating, but it isn’t necessary, so he doesn’t try as hard as he would’ve around the team.

He doesn’t miss a single shot.

All are aimed straight to the head. All hit right between the eyes. A job well done. Like steak! He doesn’t like well done steak, though. Whatever.

Looking all around, keeping his guard up, he narrows in on a utility belt, right on the hip of a soldier in his path that he had just downed.

Slowing down, still running, he bends to open it, for less than a second, grabbing for whatever he can find. Aaaaaand… there! A keycard! Perfect!

Lance got lucky this time. Feeling the plastic-like material, much thicker than the general cards on Earth, he grins, knowing the significance of the keycard from both habit and experience. Once he gets to the sliding door, he’ll need one.

He readies the card to slide in as he gets closer to what must be the doorway. There are only a few Galra left, all but three on the ground, and all gunning for him. When he looks behind him, he’s met with the barrels of maybe seven soldiers’ blasters. He sprints faster.

He gasps, slowed for a millisecond at the concentrated vibrations in his armor, as it reverberates a single bullet clipping his side; it’s a miracle it hadn’t struck a soft spot, like the near miss with Blue earlier. Once more, he’s immensely happy that his side of the comms is off. Still radio silence, however. He would’ve expected an interruption of some kind by now.

Lance slides the card into the reader as he holds a steady hand to shoot. He keeps his back to the door, like when he’s playing a horror game! He loves them, but he’s also permanently terrified of them, so he spends them all backed into a corner of the spooky room… It’s definitely a universal experience, because he’s seen the Marmorites do it too.

He takes a split second to aim, and fires at the single soldier still standing, clearly a general by the size of their ears, and they crumple to the floor. In his head, at least, that’s how they measure their rank. Ear fluffiness dictating hierarchy. In his opinion, it was a great way to run things. He leans on the door a bit, to keep his balance.

His back is so close to the door, in fact, horror-game/BoM style, that he feels it when it slides open, since that was where he had been putting a good amount of his weight, in preparation to shoot.

“Ah!” He yelps, scrambling to stay upright. It was totally a yelp with dignity, not a girly shriek at all. He isn’t going to fall, he isn’t going to fall-

He doesn’t, but it’s kind of a close thing. He just pinwheels his arms for a while, until he regains his balance.

”You’ve got to be kidding me,” he groans, and dodges another laser. And a bullet, because they have multiple kinds of guns now, he supposes. Yay, diversity.

Slipping inside, he stands right beside the entrance, watching as the Galra soldiers still pelt the doorway with their diverse guns. God, do they ever let up? Of course there’s the whole ‘death before dishonor’ shebang they’ve got going on, but they had to know when it was too late, right?

Lance relaxes a little as it finally closes, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. There are still bangs, indenting the metal, but it fades as they figure he’s too far in now to catch. That, or-

Suddenly, he hears the distinct whir of Blue’s laser, and the pandemonium back in the hold. She must’ve escaped. He huffs a laugh.

There are no more bangs.

_Blue_. He projects an image of her, staying away from a camera, and a comical security guard Galra playing with a paddle ball and kicking his legs up on the desk, and most importantly, not seeing her. 

_Stay away from their sights-_

An image of her helping him get some prisoners.

_Until I find the prisoners._ No need to put her in danger of being captured. Lance rather likes to play it safe now… Too many ignorant close calls will do that to somebody.

Opening his eyes, Lance steels himself again, in position to move and investigate once more. He glances at the keycard, and has to double-take. 

“Score,” he murmurs in awe, turning it so it catches the light better. Somehow, it looks more shiny to him now.

The keycards always belong to higher ranking (bigger eared), trusted Galra, and they usually have access to most of the ship. Evidently, he got lucky this time, as it seems to have belonged to the second-in-command of this place.

Lance whistles, admiring it for just a second, and tucks it in one of the undersuit pockets for later. Always a good thing to have, especially since he could use it later in another place. The chain of command dictates that the most trusted generals would have access to many more places, which means that he could move through this place without blasting the cell down, which means a much easier time for him. Awesome.

He might just blast through the cell anyways. For aesthetic reasons.

Lifting his rifle, he runs through the general layout in his mind.

_Four left hallways lead to the living spaces and storage rooms, four right hallways lead to the cells, three center hallways lead to the command centers. Cells are always the second door to the left side. They always have torture chambers on the third door to the right side._ After thinking about the infiltration missions and realizing the ships are always with the same layout, he had memorized them. Just to be safe. He’s no Pidge or Hunk, but he knows what he needs to know. Most of the time.

The layout was pretty simple, and he usually only uses the basic, four-by-four memorization thing, but he could find his way to the laundry rooms if he needed to. Maybe the druid would be there, washing their cloaks of evil.

Currently, it would be best if the druid was simply travelling somewhere via this ship, maybe to Bora Bora or something, and not experimenting on the prisoners. So then the prisoners and therefore the druid wouldn’t be in the torture room, and he wouldn’t have to fight the druid, but all he could do was pray.

He’s still dreading having to check the ‘experimentation’ room.

Breathing steady, moving quickly, he turns right. _One._ Nobody’s in this hallway, and there’s only one door. He knows it leads to the slave’s kitchen. He turns right again. _Two._ An empty hall, and no doors either. Two vents, one leading to the soldier’s cafeteria and one leading to the main command center, both leading to the soldier’s living quarters. Again. _Three._ Three doors, one a trick leading to nothing, just to waste time, one a mock arena to prepare slaves for what not to do or say so the empire doesn’t look bad, one a living quarters for the kitchen staff. Again.

He shoots three sentries in the head, all of them walking the same direction he was, just further along. They never saw him coming.

Three doors, and the second one is the only one on the right side. First a fake door. Second the cell door. Third the torture chamber.

Bingo.

Lance bursts into the cell, which was - aside from the three sentries - left unsupervised, likely as a result of too many frontline soldiers and too little sense. “My name is Lance McClain, Paladin of the Blue Lion of Voltron, I’m getting you out of here!” He shouts, over the noise outside. He scans the group of maybe twenty alien prisoners.

Three small ones, possibly children. Half were effeminate, which may not mean female, and a good portion were masculine, not strictly male, while about five were simply androgynous. A couple are wounded, more are missing some appendages, and all are starved. Sallow cheeks and thin limbs, shivering in the cold cell. Lance shivers too. It never gets better, to see these things. 

“Follow me, and if you can, try to carry anyone who can’t walk. We’re all gonna get out of here.” Lance tries to make his voice just loud enough so they could hear him, as to not be alarming or anything. A little shouting is enough, in his opinion.

Some gasps and murmurs flood the cell block, but the ones who can stand lift some who can’t, just leaning into them or carrying, and they all crowd around the door. He calls Blue to go to the nearest airlock, in his head, and the corner of his lip lifts a little as she responds excitedly. A big ripple in the ocean, a refreshing river at dawn when the sun was just rising, a strong current tugging at your feet to move.

Like routine, as he has done many times before, he carries two who can’t walk. This time, it’s a blue anthropomorphic dog child with a limp, and a multicolored effeminate alien with no legs. He leads all of them through the ship, three turns to the left and one to the right, until they reach an unused airlock.

He hits the button to open the first door with his elbow, and Blue lands inside. The younger prisoners cheer, and the older ones grin. He presses the close button with his other elbow, and opens the second door so they can enter. Blue opens her jaw, and they all rush in. Lance knows that some of them have waited years, decades for this moment.

Now, he has to look for an able-bodied person to hand off the two he’s holding. Not the old tree-like guy, not the one who doesn’t have their left arm, maybe…

“Hey,” Lance gives a winning smile, one less wide than his natural one, but as nice and polite as he thinks he can make it. The kind he gives to his aunts that always pinch his cheeks, and that makes them call him a handsome boy getting so big that they can’t believe it. Cause they knew him when he was just a baby, and now they feel old, and whatever.

“Can you please help, just to get them to sit down in Blue? Please?” He asks a strong-looking sparkly alien. The alien’s face rumples in confusion, then examines him for a quick millisecond, and then they flash their own smile, although it’s much more… interested? He doesn’t know what for, because it’s not that interesting, what he’s asking, if he’s being honest.

“Of course, how many seats are in this lion, if you don’t mind me asking?” Lance still really has to go, to check and everything, but he’ll indulge this odd line of questioning if it means he gets to leave quicker.

“You guys are gonna have to sit on the floor, sorry. There’s one pilot seat. There are some blankets in one compartment, though, if you want them. Now can you please help these guys in?” Was that too rude? He hopes not.

“I’ll help, yeah. But can I sit in the pilot’s seat?” What?

“What?” He repeats out loud, scrunching his nose and furrowing his brow. That makes… zero sense? “You’re not a paladin, so you wouldn’t be able to pilot-“

“Nah, you can sit in my lap,” the alien grins lazily. The effeminate alien chokes, while the dog child just stares, and Lance doesn’t get it.

“But I would still have to pilot? And I already said you guys have to sit on the floor?”

Their grin only grows, and they lean in towards him. “You can pilot while you’re sitting right on my-“

“Please just carry us in the giant lion,” the effeminate alien practically begs. “No more of this.” Lance almost wants to know what he was gonna say, but then almost positively doesn’t. If there’s one thing that spending a year with aliens will teach you, it’s not to question some things. 

They roll their four eyes, and sigh dramatically. Lance is an expert at that. It’s the classic exasperation-manipulation-face, he would know. He went to a drama club for five years in a row. One time he missed three weeks of school for a stomach ache he didn’t have. Really, he’s so hardcore, and he can’t believe he never gets any credit for it!

“Fine,” they huff, and they reluctantly take the alien from Lance, holding them in a way reminiscent of a slightly more spiteful and uncomfortable bridal-style carry. “You can hold the kid, and I’ll hold you.”

“Fine.” The effeminate alien snaps. It’s not super effective from the viewpoint of being held like that.

“Fine.” The sparkly alien snaps back. They readjust the effeminate alien in their arms, and look expectantly at Lance to hand over the child.

“Alright, thank you guys,” he tries his smile again, but softer, and both of them just stare at him. Maybe it was a bad move. He clears his throat, and lifts the dog kid off his hip-

“Please!” Lance’s eyes go wide as the child suddenly clutches at his chest plate as tight as possible with their tiny fists. It’s all they can grip onto. “I, I need-“ They sob and attempt to bury their head in his neck. He automatically shifts their weight to his left arm and places his right hand in their fur on top of their head, stroking comfortingly. Uncle Lance senses, it’s him on autopilot.

“What do you need? Can you tell me fast, please, I have to go,” he says, bouncing them up and down and trying to communicate his apologeticness through eye-contact to the waiting aliens.

“Maw’a,” they hiccup. “Maw’a, I want Maw’a, please.” They say, with stupidly big and watery puppy-dog eyes. Not fair. But besides the unfairness of their cute face, Lance now needs to find some ‘Maw’a’, and that now takes precedence over his personal escape. Well.

“A Lup’enei term for mother,” the effeminate alien inclines their head in understanding. Lance inhales sharply. “I saw them together before she was taken, maybe seven vargas ago. The guard said it was for experimentation.” Their eyes look far away, a tad glassier than before. “It was such a horrible thing, to witness them rip a mother from their child so callously.”

Okay. So now, when Lance checks the torture chamber, there could possibly be somebody’s mother. And possibly a druid. Exactly what he hadn’t wanted. And yet...

Lance misses his own mother so much. Too much, at times, when his heart squeezes right out of his chest and his eyes are too wet and he can’t think right. When his head resounds his wish for her to comfort him, and his arms resound his wish for her to hug him, and his eyes resound his wish to see her safe and happy, and his ears resound his wish to hear her, and his heart just breaks. And this is a child feeling this.

He’s nearly an adult. Actually, he is, if you count his recent birthday, although he doesn’t like to, since it wasn’t celebrated, because nobody remembered it, and he doesn’t like to count events that don’t have significance like that.

Still, as a technical adult, he misses his own mother more than anything else back on Earth. And although he’s been missing her for longer than seven hours, he knows how long time feels as a child. As a child as small as that.

He doesn’t want that for _anybody_.

“Do you know what your… Maw’a looks like?” He asks as gently as possible, and the dog child looks down, and starts fidgeting with his armor, running their sharpened nails across the top of the plate.

They begin to hesitantly describe her. “Sh-she’s got blue fur like mine, and purple eyes, and she has a pretty necklace I gave her. I got it from this stall at a swap-moon, it has these shell things that she said remind her of home, but I... I… I don’t know…” The child starts to shake unconsciously, and Lance pets more insistently, pulling them closer, and they throw their arms around his neck.

“Shhhhh, shhhhhh,” he attempts to comfort them, and hugs them right back.

He takes a while to calm them down, and then pulls away a little. They try to grab right back at him, but he puts a finger to their mouth. “Okay. I’m gonna get your Maw’a, but you need to stay here, with Blue. You see her?” He takes his hand away from them to gesture to Blue, full with passengers now, waiting on them. The kid looks awed, eyes wide and mouth fallen open. Lance tries to hide his pride, and keeps explaining. “These nice people,” he points to the two aliens, who were getting more impatient, “are gonna take you into Blue. I’ll come back, with your Maw’a, as soon as I can. Okay?”

“Okay,” The kid seems convinced, and he rejoices internally. “But!” They look around, and lean into his ear. He knows the drill. A secret is going to be told, and he has to play along. He leans in too.

“Y-you have to bring her back safe,” they tell him, hands cupped around his ear and their mouth.

“That was already the plan, but I’ll be sure to be extra, extra safe. Alright? Now please go with them, they’re waiting for you.” Lance really hopes that they don’t judge him too harshly for taking too long.

He swiftly plants the kid into the effeminate alien’s arms, and the sparkly alien whisks them both away. He waves at the kid, who’s peeking over a shoulder and bouncing in the alien’s grip. They wave back. Lance turns back to the airlock entryway, psyching himself up to go to the exact place he had been dreading entering.

—

_Alright. Okay. Alright. Okay. Okie dokie. This is fine. This is good. I’m fine with this. No gut feeling is screaming in my face to stop and think about what I’m doing. Nothing at all._

The whole ‘self-comforting’ thing is going just incredible for Lance, right now, who is pacing in front of the ‘experimentation’ room. 

He’s going into the room that he had already known beforehand that he would have to enter. The room that was made specifically to kill people. The room for killing people. The killing people room. The killing people room for Kuzco.

He was going into that room?

Lance sighs, stops right in front of it, and drags his hand over his face. _Bad Lance, don’t touch your face, your armor is dirty and you’ll clog your pores and get acne_ , he chides himself, but it’s less strong than it might’ve been, if he wasn’t about to possibly be murdered.

The first door to the right. The door to his doom.

He turns to face it. Pulling his bayard out and turning it into his rifle, he puts it on his shoulder, readies himself to shoot, to defend himself if necessary, and slides the keycard into the slot.

One inch in, two inches…

“Nope,” he pulls the card right out, and takes his rifle back down, transforming it back into its bayard form. “No, nonononono, not today. Not today, not ever, no, I refuse, I-“

He freezes.

_“Y-you have to bring her back safe,”_ echoes through his mind.

“Oh, seriously? You really had to do that to me,” he mutters. Well, now he’s morally obligated to help a motherless child. Pidge would swear right now, but he’s not Pidge, so he doesn’t. Instead, he broods, like somebody who wasn’t a complete heathen.

Like Kei-

_Nevermind_.

Lance turns his bayard into his rifle, readies himself, and slides the card into the slot.

No time for regrets now.

No time to-

-no time to see that there’s nothing but a metal wall behind the door.

“Wha…?”

He had forgotten. The first door to the right was the fake door. He’d opened the wrong door.

“... Is this a pigeon...”

Grandma had sort of had a large influence in his life.

He lets out a breath, furrows his brow, and taps his foot in concentration. _Fake door is the first door, to the left. Cell is the second door, to the right. Third door to the left is…_

The torture chamber.

He glances warily to the now-threatening door.

Well. If he’s gonna go out, he’s gonna do it with his gun. Go out with a bang, like he’s always said.

He pulls himself up by his bootstraps, metaphorically at least, raises his gun to sit on his shoulder, and stalks towards the door.

Blue is waiting around the ship again, avoiding detection, carrying the freed prisoners. The team hadn’t made a noise since he’d turned off his own comms. Lance had dealt with a child, and promised to find their mother. So, in other words, if this all went south, Blue wouldn’t be able to get to him soon enough, the team wouldn’t be able to get to him soon enough, and the child may lose their mother and all faith in Voltron. As well as the other prisoners.

Military school had _so_ not prepared him for this.

But the clock was ticking, and Lance had to bring up all vestiges of courage that he had, for what was practically a suicide mission. All right. This was, luckily or unluckily, not his first rodeo like this.

Lance tries to tug his happy thoughts to the surface, and the unfailing optimism that he has always displayed to the team, time and time again. ( _Never mind how fake it always was_.)

Hey, maybe he wouldn’t have his face mutilated beyond identification when he was found.

Okay, happy thoughts are now cancelled. The adrenaline train is pulling into the station. Choo choo. It’s here.

Lance sucks in a final, unyielding breath, summoning his inner Keith’s Gryffindor-ish bravery/stupidity combo, and pushes the keycard into the slot. He takes it back out to put in his pocket again, just in case he’s alive to use it later.

The door silently slides open, and Lance’s lungs have already squeezed out the remaining oxygen left in them by the time he crouches himself in the dark corner right beside it and examines just what he’s gotten himself into. He feels very strongly that he’s made a terrible mistake by the time that the door is shut again.

The room is big, big enough that his perch is far from the other side of the room, where a propped up table stands. It’s also dim, glowing the faint purple that lights the entire ship. But… somehow, this place in particular looks much more menacing, much darker. Perhaps it’s more dim than usual, which seems unlikely, because the hallway’s light hadn’t made the room any brighter. Lance is incredibly grateful for it, as it had made sure that he hadn’t been caught.

Perhaps it’s the very nature of it. Perhaps, it’s the blue-furred, lupine alien, with purple eyes and a shell-like necklace, bound with leather straps to the propped up table; her arms and legs stretched uncomfortably wide to each corner. She’s panting, shaking, sporadically and uncontrollably. The blue fur, identical to the pup’s, is matted in various spots with some thick liquid.

Lance swallows as he realizes what it is.

And, the moment he does, he belatedly registers that another figure is in the room as well.

A figure with a dark cloak, blending in with the shadows, and a long finger dragging along the alien’s right leg. _Yaoi hands_ , he thinks, and immediately regrets it.

The creepy dragging finger stops at one matted bit, and pushes a tad harder into the gash that must be hiding behind the fur. The alien cries out, an unbearable sound that makes Lance flinch. The figure doesn’t even pause.

An image pops into his head. A raging wave calming, ice melting, a tide pulling back. Often, Blue’s messages come in threes. He likens it to the three states of water.

The battle is over outside. And his job still isn’t done. Blue’s avoiding detection for now, but he’s the last thread they’re waiting on to snap. He needs to get back to base, _fast_.

Lance turns his attention back to the situation at hand, the very not-great situation that he has to deal with before he can leave. Wonderful. Fantastic. Amazing.

“How interesting,” the druid murmurs, eyes flickering from the leg to the alien’s strained face. “And disappointing. I had been told, by my sources, of your species’ notable strength, your resistance to pain… and yet you’re so weak from these minor wounds.”

He would like to very loudly voice his disagreement with that, but he’s a sniper. A sniper does not reveal their nest no matter what, does not expose their position to the enemy. If he lets the druid know that he’s here, that he could pose a threat…

He clutches his rifle closer with his suddenly wobbly hands.

“Tell me, is this a shared trait with the rest of your people?” The druid queries, pressing in once again, and the mother trembles violently.

Lance knows what this is. The druid wants to know if they can take more of this species to fight in the gladiator rings, if they would be good _entertainment_. And in his head, he begs, tries to communicate telepathically to the alien to say yes, that they were weak. That they shouldn’t be exploited like this, because it wasn’t worth it. However, she was so distant to everything in her agony that he doubted she would have the brain power to consider what her response would mean to the druid.

“No,” she sobs, “No, please, just let me go, let me see my son, please, please...” The druid tsks, and removes their hand. She groans, a cocktail of relief and pain, from the constant aches her injuries must provide in spades.

“Now, that would be rude. You are my guest, after all. You can’t leave me so soon.” They step back, inspecting the slumped dog-alien before them. “And especially when nobody will look for you. Nobody knows you and your fellow prisoners are gone. Nobody knows you’re here, with me. This room,” the druid gestures widely, “is soundproof.”

The room is soundproof.

Wait. That means…

The druid has no way of knowing Voltron is here. No way of knowing that the prisoners were free. No way of knowing that they should have put up protections. No way of knowing...

The druid gets closer to the alien again, and the mother’s face is filled with nothing but fear, horror, hopelessness…

“Nobody,” the druid hisses, “can hear you scream.”

That Lance is here.

He acts entirely on instinct.

It’s a quality that had maybe led him to be apt for the Red Lion, at one point, and had helped him to make some good and bad calls. And it’s a necessary skill to have as a sniper, like knowing how to find a decent perch, being able to hide in plain sight, having hand-eye coordination. Instinct is how he has survived this long, and how he knows how to line up a shot during battle better than during training.

He sets his rifle into place on his shoulder. His finger is resting on the trigger. The scope shows the druid’s hooded head, right where their ear should be.

His hand is entirely still.

He breathes in.

He breathes out.

He takes the shot.

It’s over in less than three seconds.

Lance isn’t fond of watching what happens when he kills somebody.

No matter who it was, or what they’d done, the sight of brains, blood, and guts, all over the floor… It wasn’t appealing to him. Rather than pride, he felt disgust. For the gore, and at times, for himself. He has lowered himself this far, he has dirtied his hands, his name, his family’s name, his heart. There are many things that he can’t take back, and death is one of them.

Some days, he wonders what his family would think, his cousins, his sisters, his brothers, his grandparents, his papa, his mama, his nieces and nephews; if they would be as disgusted as he is by what he’s done.

By what he will do.

War changes people, in the way that it makes them learn how far they will go. Where their own line in the sand is drawn. And there are nights that he can’t make excuses, there are nights that can’t convince himself that he’s still good, because nobody who’s bad thinks that they are bad. He has murdered. For a good cause, but how good was it? Has he ruined lives? Has he helped to win a war? The only thing that he can comfort himself with is that he has saved lives, for every life he has taken.

Saving a life never rids your hands of the blood that comes from taking one, though. And blood sticks under fingernails, dries and stays on the underside of your hand while you don’t even notice it’s still there. It stains your clothes, your head, and your heart. Paints your dreams and your waking life. Passing people become mental targets, a persistent, unwanted question; could I hit them from this distance? Your hands itch for motion, always ready to line up the scope, ready to _gogogogogofightfightfightfightfight_.

Always.

Lance knows these things very intimately. If he didn’t know them, then he wouldn’t have ever escaped from any of his recent depressive states. He needs to think about them and reason with his mind to convince himself that he’s not too bad. Even though depression doesn’t care for logic, it’s a coping mechanism for himself, to find solutions like these to problems in his brain.

Because blood also comes off with soap and water.

And he can see that life, in all its glory, can grow flaws. His most important job is to tell the difference between that glory and the dead bits right next to it. He thinks he’s relatively good at it.

And as blood comes off with soap and water, as life grows flaws and war changes people, as idea births introspection and as paper takes to flame, and as the truths of the universe are, he feels no disgust as he kills. This time, he is saving a mother, saving a child, pruning the branches of life.

He can accept that.

The hole in the side of the druid’s head is centered right in the middle of their pointed elf ear. It exits exactly through the same spot on the other elf ear.

And for the first time, after a year of perfect assassinations and immaculate hits on passing soldiers; for doing a job well...

He feels pride.

…

He shoots both of her hands too, right through the palm, just to keep up with Coran’s advice. It’s helped him before.

So he has taken a life. He has saved one.

And he regrets none of it.

—

Lance is currently in the process of dying, or, in other words, he’s making his way to the airlock. Slowly. Dragging along, with a very persistent weight on his back.

He pulls the alien mother’s arms over his shoulders, attempting a one-sided piggyback ride. Not to be rude to her, but she’s stupidly heavy for the size that she is, he’s decided. At least, he thinks so. She is an alien, after all, so maybe weight is distributed differently with her species. He’s not that smart, so he wouldn’t really know if that was plausible.

She’s totally limp, and stupidly heavy, as previously stated, which isn’t fair for his little stick limbs. And it’s even worse, because she's hurt, and he has to be careful. He’s thin and flexible, not a muscle-man like Keith!

_Because Keith’s muscles really do look good, like that one day in the training room, when he was all sweaty in his new grey tank-top from the space mall because he’s grown out of all his old clothes, and he’s no longer short and agile like he used to be, he’s three inches taller than Lance and he’s much more powerful, and strong, and he could totally just bench-press Lance-_

Lance needs to stop thinking about Keith.

When he finally gets to the airlock, he’s trying his best to pretend that he secretly has the strength to not be panting as intensely as he is, and he almost collapses in relief at the sight of Blue hovering outside.

“Thank God,” he wheezes, and coughs right after. Maybe someday his breathing will have a chance to recover.

He uses all that he has left in him to raise his elbow, to push the open button, echoing what he’d done maybe fifteen minutes before. Then, once Blue is inside, he pushes the close button, and then he opens the second door. This process is way too complicated, why don’t they just have a one-button option? His elbow’s getting tired from all this… this elbow grease.

Really, Lance is a comedian. A genius in his own right.

Elbow grease.

Ha.

Wow.

Blue opens up, and lets out the sparkly alien, with the dog child hanging off of their leg, like Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat from the old cartoons his Gen Z grandma had him watch.

Lance will always be eternally thankful for when they effortlessly lift the alien lady off of his back. He resists the urge to flop onto the ground and stay there, but it’s a near thing.

The puppy kid paws at the sparkly guy’s pants until they sigh and lift him up, to be given a _real_ piggyback ride, and be in view of their mom. Or Maw’a, whatever she was called. Once he sees her, the child already is minutely less tense, loosening his tight grasp on their shirt.

“The kid wouldn’t let go of me until he saw his mom,” the sparkly alien explains, a sheepish look on their face, and Lance has to hold himself back from telling them that truly, Lance wouldn’t have cared if they had backflipped off Blue covered in neon green lobsters to help him carry the woman.

“That’s fine, I’m sorry it took so long. I’m just not that… you know…” He scratches behind his ear, scrambling to think of anything that wouldn’t imply he was just that weak.

“I get it, you’re not really buff? So, does that maybe mean you’d just like bottom better than top, in the bedroom? I prefer the latter, but I can always switch it up, if you don’t.” The alien winks at him.

He tilts his head, in utter confusion. “I don’t know? I’d just be grateful to have a bunk bed. What does that have to do with me taking a while to get here? Do you have a bunk bed? Why would I want to sleep in your bunk bed?” It’s starting to feel like one of those ‘weird invitations’, as he calls them.

… He never said he was particularly good at naming things.

He’s been given some ‘weird invitations’ in the past, like when another student at the Garrison had asked him to spend a week at his vacation house over spring break. He’d thought it was a week-long party thing until he found out that the guy only wanted _him_ to be there, while his parents were away, and that sounded serial killer-y to him, so he opted out. Not gonna be the white person in a horror movie.

Or the time a girl had wanted him to give her a back massage, which was kinda strange to him, since he was staying over for a sleep-over with her brother. And her brother, who he’d only met two days before the sleep-over, had asked him to ‘Netflix and chill’. It was fine, until he started to get closer and closer to Lance, and once again, it felt creepy. He left to go to the bathroom and didn’t go back to their house. Hey, he’d never said which bathroom.

Lance has been through a lot of things like that, where people start to act all strange around him, and he yeets himself out of the conversation. Or room. Or house.

When he’d told his sister Veronica about it, she had looked at him scrutinizingly for a solid minute, and never brought it up again. Never had he gotten a straight answer from anybody he tried to question for giving him a ‘weird invitation’, so he’d stopped entirely. At least, mostly. Right now, he isn’t sure what this exchange is.

“I, you don’t, what?” The sparkly guy is getting more sparkly, and Lance has no idea what that means to their culture, but the disco ball effect is a bit hypnotizing to watch. “I… How do you…”

“Just get back here and stop it, he doesn’t understand it,” calls the effeminate alien. He’d missed her! His saving grace, from this train-wreck of an interaction. “It’s hopeless, man.”

He glances back to the guy, who was still stunned for some reason. Whatever it was, Lance is just glad they haven’t dropped the mom and the kid. He smiles in a way that he prays comes off as comforting, but probably just looks strained. “How about we just get back to Blue?”

“Yeah, sure, okay.” Lance wonders how they can still carry the two Lup’enei unhindered, with the dazed expression they have, while he had been struggling and putting in his utmost effort. Unfair. Stupid extraterrestrial genes.

_Like how Keith had had a big growth spurt, even though he’d been nineteen when he left for the Blade and shouldn’t have gotten one that late by human standards. And apparently Galra people generally have two around that age, so he’d had two separate ones when he was off in the time travel vortex thingie or whatever, and he was taller than Lance now, and he really shouldn’t be stuck on this after three months of seeing him-_

Nope, back in the repression-box you go, Keith-related thoughts. Gone. Nonexistent. Hasta la vista, you useless walnuts. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

Once they get into Blue, with Lance not in the sparkly guy’s lap and all the freed prisoners huddled in the back of the cockpit, he’s fully prepared to forget everything that had just happened, so that he might not see them in his dreams tonight. Or nightmares. Night terrors. There are many names for spicy memories, but he often elects to ignore them, in favor of spicy memories. Much more flavorful.

“Everybody ready?” He shouts to the mass of aliens behind him.

A jumbled mess of answers greets him, but he doesn’t need their input, really.

“Alright, let’s go.” _Time to face the music_ , he laments.

—

He lands Blue in the hangar (very expertly, might he sarcastically add), and takes a moment for himself. To put up a barrier, in order to bounce off all the passive-aggressive comments from Pidge and the well-meaning-but-still-reminding-him-of-his-failure-to-do-something-right comfort from Hunk and the I’m-not-mad-just-disappointed pitying look from Shiro and the lecturing from Allura telling him he has to do better to be a paladin of Voltron and either complete anger or completely being ignored by Keith.

Coran has become somewhat of his safe space, over his impromptu journey across the universe. Take a guess why.

Blue bends and opens her mouth to let the prisoners out, while he mortars the bricks and fills the moat in his mental shield, breathing deep, like his mom’s meditation app had always told him to. The backlash for being late like this usually isn’t as bad as it had been with the Fight Club LARPer (read: the clone), but he knows better than to hope for the best at this point.

The prisoners are directed away by the Castle’s instruction, to the little area where they can identify their species, planet, etc. It’s crazy useful for getting them back individually, through pods that return automatically once they’re confirmed to be safe. They hadn’t used them before, out of fear of being tracked by the Galra Empire through returning pods, but Pidge and Hunk had rigged up an invisibility feature that kept them free of random attacks at three in the morning.

Lance will never forget that fight. He almost fell asleep, only kept awake by Blue sending phantom ice buckets over his head.

Not a fun time. No muy divertido.

In the present, however, he is keeping himself vividly awake through the probably unhealthy method of repeatedly slamming his head into the dashboard. He groans, rubbing his temple and leaning back into the pilot’s seat. Maybe it isn’t a conducive way to stay conscious, but it is effective. And _yes_ , he does know what those words mean.

Being raised speaking Spanish meant that he had to learn every word that he could in English, so he knows a lot of them. Just… he has a hard time remembering every one of them, sometimes. His brain can only retain so much. And it means that sometimes he forgets what pants are called, but remembers ‘rhotacism’. Well, beggars can’t be choosers.

Blue sends him something. A cold stream, warm water freezing, a window growing frost. _Pay attention_. But to what? Is something going to-

His head snaps up, and he straightens his back as he sees a holoscreen call come up. He clicks the answer option on reflex, and watches as it pulls up Allura and the rest of the team. For some reason, they seem… in shock? They’re all sitting at the table, apart from Coran and Allura. He squints, examining the odd scene.

Pidge is staring into the void, slumped in her chair, Keith’s eyebrows have disappeared halfway into his bangs while he sits with military-grade posture, Hunk has a faint smile and a hand partway covering his mouth, hunched a bit with an elbow leaning on the table, Shiro is simultaneously a combination of Pidge and Hunk, Allura is standing stick-straight and expressionless in front of the camera, and Coran is lurking in the background with a beaming grin.

All he wants to know is… 

What _happened_?

“Lance, please report back. We have to talk about something.” Allura’s voice is shaky, and he’s not sure if it’s the audio quality or if it’s what she really sounds like. Blue’s speakers are pretty great when blasting Shakira, but maybe it’s worse when calling? It hasn’t happened before, but he doesn’t know why else she wouldn’t have a smooth tone talking to him.

“Okay?”

She turns off the call before he can hang up, or inquire as to why anything is off. He exhales roughly, and taps a staccato rhythm on the arm of his seat.

Scanning through everything he can think of, he doesn’t understand why they would be acting like this. He hasn’t done anything too out-of-character. Maybe…

Wait! He had turned off the comms so they couldn’t hear him! And he still doesn’t have them on. So maybe they tried to contact him, but he couldn’t hear them!

But then, he’d turned off the comms on _his_ side…

Maybe…

He chokes on nothing. “Blue, pull up the comm options.”

The screen pops up, and he checks what’s enabled.

_External Communication System: Off_

_Broadcasting Communication System: On_

Lance falls back in his chair.

He had turned off the team’s comms. And not his own. So they’d heard him. They’d heard _everything._

Ah.

Well.

This is just fantastic.

Lance really feels that people don’t understand that he, as a person, is really sarcastic. He’s dramatic, petty, sarcastic, and generally not fun to be around all the time. Sometimes, he’s been mean to people by accident, when he’s just being honest or sarcastic, and since he’s realized it, he’s been on a mission to fix it. He’s mostly managed to snip that bit off of his personality, but it still creeps up on him on occasion.

In order to be nice to people, and try to make them actually like him ( _although he’s not sure how that’s possible, he doesn’t have that many redeeming qualities_ ), he’s changed - or tried to change - some things about himself.

His too-wide smile, his stubbornly stick-thin body, his previous acne, his sarcasm, his interest in theatre, his dramatic personality, his constant need for attention, his interest in more feminine clothes, his emotional nature. All things he’s been insulted, ignored, or excluded for.

He smiles smaller and more contained, he tries to exercise (it doesn’t work for him), he made an over-complicated skincare routine (which he actually got bullied for too), he tries to be more nice, he quit drama club, he tries to be less over-the-top and extra, he tries not to take it personal when people ignore him or don’t like him, he doesn’t own or wear feminine clothes anymore, he tries to tone himself down and be less genuinely emotional. People still don’t like him. He doesn’t know what else he has to do.

But when he loses the part of himself that so desperately craves to fit in, and when he’s pushed far enough or just doesn’t care anymore…

He reverts back.

And the predicament he’s gotten into…

Amazing. Fantastic. He’s in awe, he’s just ecstatic. He’s elated. Indescribably happy. He’s ignored his friends on accident, and now they probably think he doesn’t care about his job saving the universe, and that he’s not fit to be a paladin, and it’s the best thing ever. He loves it. Incredible. Just what he wanted. Thanks, Santa.

Lance stands up abruptly, and exits Blue calmly. As he walks down the hallways, guided by pure muscle memory (he’s always had a good sense of direction), he’s silent, strides not exactly confident; rather, they’re exact and automatic, light footed. He’s not walking on air. His mind is too far away to do that.

There’s not a minute that he’s walking where he’s not thinking about how he messed up. Lance’s most common tactic to desensitize himself to that is to think about it _so_ much that he almost finds it funny. Distancing himself. He’s been told before that it’s called dissociation. He’s very good at it.

By the time he reaches the dining room, he has no emotions on his face at all. It’s a perfect canvas. What will he be this time?

Sheepish? Cocky? Apologetic? Nothing at all?

The best way to figure out which is the optimal face is to read the room. Only flaw? You have to know who to cater to the most.

In this situation? Hunk is generally more lenient with him already, so he can be handled later. Pidge too, but they like to hold it over him for ages, in addition to looking at him in slight disappointment for a while. Keith is always upset with him. He only gazes at Lance in a judging manner, as if sizing him up, wondering how Lance could’ve screwed up as monumentally as he had, and uses it against him when he’s not happy with him. The only problem with not catering to Keith is that he only uses things against you when he’s genuinely angry. It makes it so much worse, because it’s always real, and he can’t handle Keith being angry at him. Or anyone, for that matter, but with Keith…

So, it’s a toss-up with Pidge and Keith. Pidge has tons of microaggressions, and Keith has a couple big insults to throw.

… Better to go with the one he’s used to. Pidge is always teasing him.

Coran is like Hunk, in that he’s more inclined to take Lance’s side and be more nice to him, but Lance would be so devastated to make Coran not like him, and he knows that Coran’s affection is less unconditional, naturally. He didn’t look disappointed in the call, so Lance will assume he won’t have to cater to him. Hopefully, that won’t come back to bite him later.

Shiro and Allura are the two he has to cater to, almost every time. Shiro has the power to kick him out; Lance knows that he wouldn’t want to hurt him, but some things are inevitable. If he messes up that badly, he’ll even leave of his own volition, if he has to. Plus, maybe it’s just him being desperate to be a favorite or to be liked by him specifically, as their leader, but Lance wants to not disappoint him. After the whole ‘evil clone’ thing, Shiro’s been distant, avoiding him, for some reason, and he doesn’t want to make it worse.

Especially since Keith goes wherever Shiro goes.

And Allura has that same power, albeit she would be more likely to use it. Lance hasn’t exactly endeared himself to her, or to anybody except Coran, miraculously.

So he’ll have to be more apologetic to them, and otherwise his ‘regular self’, whatever that is. Alright. He can do this. He can-

There’s nobody but Keith in the dining room.

There’s no plan for this.

_Abort mission, abort mission, abort mission-_

“H-“ Keith’s voice is raspy, and he furrows his brows before clearing his throat. “Hey.”

“Um,” Lance is honestly surprised at how high his own is. “Hi.”

They sit in total silence for a minute, Keith at the table and Lance still standing awkwardly in the doorway. 

There’s no plan for this. Keith is just sitting there, alone, like he’s been waiting for him? Why? Was he elected as the best one to give the verdict about his place on the team? His eyes keep darting away, and he’s tapping on the edge of the table unconsciously, as evident by the noise. Keith hates the tapping sound.

_Psychology. You know this. Why is he acting like this?_

Alright.

Tapping. Generally a nervous fidget, even more likely with the lack of choice in the action. And his arms are crossed, defensive. Closed off. Distancing.

An attempt at self-comfort.

If Keith was chosen to tell him he’s off the team, he’s certainly not looking forward to it. Unrealistic. So, maybe he won’t have to leave.

Avoiding eye contact. Also an anxious action, is he planning to lie to Lance? Or is he just thinking about something, maybe…

Maybe how to speak to Lance about something? Keith isn’t that good at interacting with people generally, he’s told him about how hard he finds it to relate to other people, to find his words. He’s not articulate, not gifted with language, not like…

Keith had stopped there. Sometimes, Lance just takes his own time, spins in a spinny chair, and tries to figure out who Keith had almost mentioned.

Pidge is terrible with speaking to people, unless they’re close to them. Hunk is too nervous to talk normally to strangers, or even close friends at times. Coran and Allura and Shiro are good with words, but he’s the only one who really listens to Coran, and Keith doesn’t like Allura. So it’s probably Shiro, although he has no idea why Keith hadn’t finished the sentence.

It’s not as if it was _Lance_. He stutters, and makes people uncomfortable, and he sucks at interpreting people, unless he really tries. Compared to Keith, he’s got it easy, though. Keith has made more than one important political figure upset with him, and Allura still isn’t over the debacle with the Jok-Lapiwe planet. Apparently, punching the High Priest in the face was frowned upon. Who knew.

It was kind of strange, since the guy had just taken Lance’s hand and kneeled, saying something about a consort in whatever a harem was, and Keith had pulled him up by the front of his shirt and socked him in the jaw. Despite his capability as a leader, he’s really bad with diplomacy. And Lance still wants to know what a harem is.

Wait.

Keith. Is bad with diplomacy. And Lance is expecting him. To make the first move. In a conversation. Wait.

Maybe… Maybe Lance should take that initiative.

Well, it’s now or never.

He walks over, and pulls out a seat right next to Keith. It almost gives him flashbacks to the time they’d had the food-goo-food-fight, sitting in the same chairs, with their hands locked together. It had been so much easier back then, when their horizons had been only as far as the sunrise and the sunset, and they hadn’t been responsible for so much, everything so much bigger than them. Lance feels nostalgia for when nostalgia was actually for the good things, in childhood, and not for the bare minimum of decency. Good times.

“So what happened?” He leans over and rests his head on his arm, still facing Keith, inquiring as subtly as possible.

He’s not very subtle.

He figures that the place to start is at the beginning, and maybe Keith could shed some light on the whole thing? He’s not the type to skirt around the issue, or beat around the bush, whatever. He was blunt and honest. Lance knows from experience that Keith was a great person to come to for the _real_ answers, like when Lance had been his right-hand man. Literally.

“You tell me,” Keith replies, and Lance would take offense to his sharp tone if it wasn’t for the slight upturn to his lips and the glint in his eyes. Why is that there?

The glint thing, not the other thing. It’s nice to look at.

Not that Lance is staring or anything! He’s not!

“You’re the one who never responded, and took forever, and-“

Keith fell silent.

“And what?” He resists the intense desire to slam his hands on the table and demand a straight answer. This wasn’t what he’d expected! He wants a refund!

A refund on the Keith conversation. On a Keith convo. On a KeithKonvo. Sounds marketable to him. Just make it all k’s, and it sells. Like the band Korn. And isn’t the leader of the Blades named Kolivan? Is his mom’s name Krispy Kreme or something?

As he’s debating the merits of actually asking Keith that question, Keith’s expression softens. It’s the tiny bit of change that gives an entirely different meaning in a translation error, a little tell that gives you a whole story. A miracle.

Even crazier, an infinitesimal, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile flits across his face, just for a fraction of a second. And it’s…

Keith never lies with his body language, with how he displays himself, through expressions and tics and habits and words and actions. So the little smile, no matter how small or how lasting, means something. Maybe it’s important, maybe Lance is analyzing it too much, but no matter the implication, to see Keith smiling, it’s…

It’s beautiful.

_Oh no. Feelings._ Lance swallows down the butterflies. Down with the foot-tongued rascals. Yeah, butterflies taste with their feet. For shame.

He’s a sponge for weird facts, okay? So what if he knows that it’s illegal to carry ice cream in your back pocket in Kentucky? If Pidge and Hunk are allowed to know smart things, he’s allowed to know dumb things. It’ll never save his life in a pinch, but it’s just something he does.

Anyways, emotions.

Lance is decidedly not an avid fan of dealing with those monstrosities.

Keith uncrosses his arms ( _a good sign, being more open and honest and comfortable_ ) and brings down his hand on the table, clearly accidentally by the way he startles along with Lance. After another bout of quiet, he averts his gaze from Lance.

“You did something good,” he bites, looking back at him, as if to see his reaction. Lance’s eyes widen.

All compliments from Keith are reluctant, said as if forcibly taken, regardless of whether it’s willingly given or not. But a compliment? From Keith?

To _him,_ of all people?

His mouth falls open. He closes it quickly, as to not look like a gaping idiot. Best not to prove anything.

“I… Thank you?”

Keith nods, and Lance turns his head to closely examine his shoes, fidgeting with the edge of his armor. Both of them are still wearing it, although Keith seems much more comfortable in it. He suspects that he has spent some time training in it recently, maybe to get used to the difference in the Blade’s uniform and the Voltron armor again.

It’s been three months.

Lance also suspects that he himself has never gotten used to the armor, and it’s been over a year.

Maybe he should take some pointers from Keith.

“Alright, nice talk,” Keith stands up from the table, and his chair screeches in tandem with Lance’s brain. _What happened when I was gone? What did I apparently do good? What is happening?!?_ “See you tomorrow.”

“I, uh, sure, okay,” his mouth says. God, he really wants to curse right now, but he doesn’t know any that would be appropriate besides _dang it_ or _quiznack_. His mother would already be angry with him for using ‘God’ in a non-religious way.

Sometimes, he really hates his sheltered upbringing.

“Okay, bye.” Keith waves as he exits the room, walking too fast to be casual. Stunned, his mind racing with unanswered questions, Lance slowly waves back.

“Bye?” Well, now he’s gone. How is Lance supposed to react to this? He scrunches his nose. Why is Keith being so weird?

What did Lance do?

—

Keith is running away. Why is he running away?

Because Lance had no clue that everybody had had the comms on. And that he could be heard. And once the team had gotten back to the Castle, Pidge had hacked the security cameras in the experiment room with the druid, and the airlock, and had seen everything, under the guise of just checking on him.

He flops onto his bed, panting, rewinding the events of the day. He throws his arm over his eyes, and laughs, just a little.

And what an insane day, it has been.

What a revealing day.

“Let’s play a game, how oblivious can Lance be?” He mumbles.

Unbelievably.

With all the time Keith’s spent with Lance, and all the blatant invitations refused unintentionally by Lance while he himself stares uncomprehendingly, it should’ve been an easy guess. And still, Lance manages to surprise him.

The sheer innocence in “I’d just be grateful to have a bunk bed.” Pidge had sputtered at the entire exchange, but that one in particular had made them choke and cough uncontrollably. How?

And that alien had been a real piece of work. They had assumed automatically based on strength about… positions… which isn’t accurate and isn’t healthy. 

( _Although Keith does have some ideas based on other things…_ _Which isn’t important. Maybe he’d just like to see Lance without all the toxic masculinity eating him up inside for once._ )

Still! Despite all the flirtation, and the innuendos Lance makes (he hasn’t made any in a while, actually? He hasn’t flirted with anybody since… Since Keith had returned… Huh), there’s always been an underlying sense that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Or that he isn’t fully aware of the meaning behind things, that he’s doing it for show, almost. Maybe it has something to do with the masculinity issue…?

Seeing Lance effortlessly snipe a druid who was in the process of torturing a prisoner, though…

Well.

Keith needs some alone time.


	3. blue fire (in your eyes, in your soul, and yet you’re blind to it)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance plays a fool thrice, for another’s benefit. Keith sees blue fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my outline for this chapter:
> 
> lance makes laugh yes everybody. but he’s also Smort. so he does big smart, but then he makes fun of self like ughhhhh. keith notices that whenever he’s around? laugh Occurs. huh. and then he sees that lance kinda exudes the comic relief vibes, but that he’s also self deprecating, and he’s like nooooooooo bb why
> 
> so that’s how i write.
> 
> btw. voltron tried to stop me from using color symbolism by changing their lions. “oh, now allura’s blue and lance is red, now you can’t make it klance with red and blue-“ cowards. you insolent fools. i am not above color symbolism. lance is blue. keith is red. it’s my fic. canon Does Not Exist.
> 
> to assume that a god cannot be of an earthly form is to assume that i am anything less than the judge, jury, and subsequent executioner of the fruits of the labor in another’s mind. You Cannot Stop Me and it is futile to think so. nothing that appears within my range of sight is without risk, as it is something beyond a world of my own that i desire and that i will not stop reaching for. no mortal hand, untouched by the divine, will slow the invulnerable hand of creation.
> 
> ty for coming to my tedtalk lmao
> 
> also: the bits about family reunions, besides the lighter fluid in the beginning, is a true story. i have a strange family.

Wires, as Lance has concluded, with gratuitous evidence, are not great bungee ropes.

That is a separate observance. He is currently concluding that wires are not easy to work with.

The second is slightly more common, he’s been told.

He’s kneeling in a room slightly smaller than the one he sleeps in, with a metallic box - about the size of five cereal boxes stacked directly against each other - sitting in front of him. A thin plate on the front is ripped off, lying on the floor next to him, small scissors tightly gripped in his steady hand.

There’s only one exit, not counting the vent on the ceiling that he may or may not be able to squeeze his way into. A door, a couple inches open. Besides a huge chair and an empty black desk, he’s left alone with the foreboding ambience that comes with the dim lighting. Seriously, who decided to have dark purple lights in every single room? Somebody needs to see! He’s working with delicate equipment and an unknown time limit!

He grits his teeth, weighs his options in his head, and snips a black wire inside the not-currently-detonating-but-probably-going-to-soon bomb, with unreadable Galran script (in a deep red because all things in the Empire have to be ominous. Plus, they’re numbers, and even though he’s learned the common Galran dialects, Lance hasn’t been taught numbers yet in this one), counting down how long he has left. Galran circuitry, apparently, is incredibly different from Earth’s, something that has frustrated and still does frustrate Team Punk to no end.

The military school, once again, has not taught him the life skills that he _actually_ needs. Dealing with alien technology and intergalactic warfare.

Down with the corrupt education system.

This ship is totally void of any important passengers (or any, really, that weren’t simply disposable guards or robots), thankfully, and there aren’t any prisoners, but unfortunately there is important information, exclusively hidden in _paper_ copies.

Somebody must’ve gotten wind that any electronically stored plans aren’t safe from Voltron. For once, Lance wished that he could change their reputation, just a little. Maybe they’re too powerful in the eyes of the public, thanks to their shows.

God, he hopes that his aerial dancing hadn’t been recorded. He doesn’t want his amazing splits to represent himself in front of possible allies, that’s behind him now! He’s changed! They’re way better splits, and they’re not in front of an audience, for one. It’s a bit… inappropriate, he’s been told? For some reason? Pidge was disturbed, but to be fair, Pidge is always a little disturbed. Or disturb _ing_.

“How much longer?” Keith hisses, turning his head a modicum closer to Lance. He’s playing the lookout, but something about his not-purple skin and the number of times he’s awkward-ed the Coalition into a hot mess of a political arena makes Lance think that he won’t be the best candidate for acting the part of a Galra guard. Now, he at least has the height and all, and some stolen armor, but Lance wouldn’t believe him to be a guard if he had been one himself.

And the whole Slav incident, well…

“You know how I am with technology! I’ve set more than one toaster on fire, and you’re expecting me to stop a _bomb_ from exploding,” he whispers, as aggressive as a whisper can possibly be. “Not that the second time was my fault, and the third time it was on purpose, but I’m not exactly a _poster-child_ for working with computers.”

It was true. The second time, it was during a family reunion that he’d come home from the Garrison to attend. His sister had accidentally dripped a little lighter fluid in the already-finicky toaster while she washed her hair and face clean of the fluid in the sink; one especially dim cousin had thought it was safe to throw a gallon of the stuff, which had been lying unused in the garage, on somebody’s head as a prank.

The toaster no longer sat by the sink, and the lighter fluid was no longer kept in the open. Family gatherings have always been a source of chaos, from two empty, stolen wine bottles being found behind the shed to the discovery that at least one distant relative is the child of two first cousins. Wild times.

The third time, Lance had just been trying his odds as a bet. Some kid in his biology class had said something about how unlikely it would be for a toaster to be set on fire once, let alone twice, and he took it as a challenge. It was just like that time he’d set cereal on fire.

Hunk had been there the first time. Lance wasn’t supposed to have been in the Garrison kitchen at two in the morning, taking shots of five hour energy and making grilled cheese in a toaster, but he had been there, doing exactly that. It didn’t end well.

They didn’t talk about the first time.

“How do you even set a toaster on fire? Is that even physically possible?” Keith asks, and Lance can’t even see his face but he bets that he’s screwing up his face and looking all perplexed, furrowing his eyebrows in a way that he used to think was angry but now he knows it’s just how Keith communicates his confusion.

( _He wishes he could help Keith with expressing his emotions better, but as a person who had once flirted very not-suavely for months with somebody who he’d had no chance with and made it look like he wasn’t serious about it and had no actual feelings beyond surface level for her while at the same time crying into his pillow at night over his own insecurities mixed with his sexuality crisis, he can’t really give any good advice when it comes to that._ )

“Faith, trust, and a little bit of pixie dust,” he mutters, quirking a little smile over the good childhood memories. Grandma was always his favorite source of old movies.

Old movies, keep in mind. Not commonly available for all children, most definitely not orphaned children with a messed up childhood and no appreciation for pop culture references, outdated or not.

He can feel the gaze burning into his back as Keith squints at him, probably questioning his life choices. “Not even gonna ask.”

“Eh,” he waved dismissively over his shoulder, channeling his inner crotchety old man. “Back in _my_ day…”

“Don’t.”

He covers his mouth with his free hand, muffling a snicker, sensing Keith’s glare with every fibre of his being.

Okay. Focus time.

Maybe he’ll make a story with the wire colors! ( _It’s not like they’ll make any parallels to his real life…)_

So the red wire here needs to be cut (A red bird leaves the nest. They’re lonely, but happy that they can make new friends in a new place), and the yellow one needs to cross over the green one to the left (A yellow bird makes friends with a green bird, and they have lots of fun together), and the blue one could stay (The blue bird loves to play with them! They play games when there’s space for them, but they never forget the red bird. Sometimes the blue bird takes the place of the red bird).

The black one needs to be snippy-snipped (The black bird leaves, and they return, and they’re different. They get better, but they never talk to the blue bird the same), the purple one crosses all over to the other side of the board (The purple flock changes all of the birds in different ways. They bring the red bird back eventually! The blue bird never admitted how much they missed the red bird, but everybody knew), okay, okay…

Before he knows it, the thing beeps angrily at him. It promptly makes a whirring sound, the noise winding down. The blinking red symbols written in Galran flicker for a minute, shutting off with a _click._ Finally!

“Yes!” He pumps his fist in the air, doing his little improvised cheer, complete with twirling and _no_ splits. Aerial or otherwise.

Keith turns his head completely to face him, insistently pressing a finger to his lips, but there’s a… softness, almost, throughout his expression. Of course, within a good second it’s gone, but Lance likes to treasure those moments whenever they pop up. They’re something precious to him. He softens his own, smiling one of his own rarer smiles. One of the wide ones, the genuine ones, that actually mean something.

He knows that Keith letting his guard down is rare, and he wants to appreciate that, for however long Keith will let him.

But maybe he’s spent too long looking weird and just staring and smiling at Keith, because Keith’s staring back, with a red tint rising on his cheeks. Keith wouldn’t want to just look at him for a while, so there has to be a reason why. It could be like not being able to look away from a train wreck, or something like that.

Okay. Change the topic, make it less serious, make him laugh. Act confident. Yeah.

“Alright, but you can’t tell me you didn’t expect me to do that flawlessly. As I always do,” he bats his eyelashes and strikes a ridiculous pose, grinning wildly. The grin grows even bigger when Keith actually laughs at the odd position he’s put himself in. ( _And Lance doesn’t feel himself melt at the sound. Fine, maybe he does._ )

And then the alarm blares, and red lights flood the room. (At least it isn’t dark purple.)

He twists to glower at the dismantled bomb in front of him accusingly. The thing must have had a mechanism in it to set off the alarms when it was tampered with.

This is why they can’t have good things.

He can already hear the few sentries in the facility coming towards them, their footsteps echoing in the halls. He whips around again, seeing Keith glaring indignantly at the alarm hiding in the corner, and steps forward a little to face Keith directly.

He’s wearing clunky armor that doesn’t fit him, and his galaxy amethyst eyes are reflecting the crimson glow around them, and his lips are parted a bit, and he’s _three inches taller than Lance, it’s unfair_ , and Lance isn’t attracted to him. It’s just the adrenaline.

And it’s just the adrenaline that makes him talk the way he does.

He clears his throat. “So, even though I’ve messed up, as per usual, I can get us out of this very easily.” He clasps his hands together in front of him, rocking back and forth once, before bursting out in one breath, before Keith can speak or process the last sentence, “I have a candy bar left from Earth so whoevergetstotheirLionfirstwinsthecandybar!”

He watches the emotions play out on Keith’s face. Incomprehension, followed by something almost sad? And at the end, a glint of competitiveness and challenge, exactly what he’d been trying to see.

He stumbles slightly when he gets out of the doorway, but he quickly regains his footing and skids as he turns the corner, Keith in hot pursuit as they race through the hallways, laughing all the way.

He doesn’t even care who wins the candy bar. He has others.

( _And maybe Keith’s face when he won had been worth falling behind._ )

—

“And _that’s_ why I think we should include dance lessons in our daily exercises!” Lance points to the final projected image of a happy stock image of a puppy waving ‘good bye’ with a flourish, wearing a triumphant smile. In his totally unbiased opinion, he thinks his presentation went pretty well.

Pidge groans, slamming their head on the table. They’re prevented from going for a second one, as Hunk places his hand between the table and their face; they let out a muffled sound, followed by Hunk pulling his hand back, wiping it on Pidge’s leg and holding it close to his chest. He looks a healthy mix of disgusted, nauseous, and fearful, a normal reaction to Pidge being Pidge. “Ew! Did you just lick my hand?”

“No.” They grin smugly. Lance can’t see them, but he just knows it’s there.

“Wha- You can’t just say you didn’t do something, when you just did it!”

“Then don’t ask,” Pidge replies, muffled from their arms now caging their head and nasally from their nose pressed close against the table. A true gremlin.

As somebody experienced with dealing with children (mainly his nieces/nephews or cousins), and somebody who’s the youngest of five, Lance has been on both ends of this exchange. Clearly, as evidenced by the unadulterated confusion on Keith’s face, he hasn’t been on either.

“Why would you lick his hand?”

It’s as if Keith has grown two heads, and one decided to belt the entirety of the Piña Colada song whilst the second began reading the Holy Bible from beginning to end, all the while he used sign language to communicate the entirety of the Bee Movie script.

In other words, everybody turns to look at him with wide eyes.

Some for different reasons than others. Pidge with a tinge of mischievous glee, Hunk with pure surprise, and Lance with envy. The life of an only child was something he never really craved, but some of the things he could’ve not gone through…

All the things he’d been misled about…

J. R. R. Tolkien’s full name is not Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkein.

He had not been told that, when he was seven.

Being the youngest of many means you have to go through a hazing process, of sorts. It’s a life you have to get used to.

“What? Do people lick each other’s hands a lot?” Keith frowns, and Lance just wants to give him a hug. He can see where this is going, considering the other people in the room, and now he just needs to figure out how to twist their jokes, specifically Pidge’s. Keith is sensitive. He hasn’t lived a solid childhood, and he’s not happy about it…

And the team knows this, of course, but they won’t consider it to be mocking if they just poke some fun. Lance has made that mistake.

Lance is… also sensitive. But he’s used to being made fun of, and making fun of himself to help out somebody else is easier. It’s just the regularly scheduled program. Nothing he can’t handle.

“Come on, nobody’s licked your hand when you were a kid and you were trying to shut them up? What’d you do instead?” Pidge giggles. “Honestly, though, it’s a universal experience. Everyone does it.”

And _oh_ , those were the wrong words to use.

Keith wants to fit in, to be normal, and knowing he’s missed out on something that apparently everybody has done? It’s something that sets him off quick. Lance doesn’t want to deal with the fallout, or see Keith depressed after the whole ordeal, working out his emotions (he says ‘working out’ but he really means repressing it until he can ignore it and blow up over the whole thing later) in the training room. Lance can’t deal with that emotional labor.

Already, Keith’s eyebrows are furrowing, and he’s shifting in on himself. Curling up a little, closing off, and _no_ , Lance has broken down too many walls of his to lose all his efforts as a result of something stupid Pidge said. Pidge says too many stupid things to be as smart as they are, honestly.

To be fair, with all the intelligence that Pidge possesses, the whole thing equals out. PEMDAS. Sciencey intelligence? Through the roof. Emotional intelligence? Nil. _Perfectly balanced, as all things should be_.

Thanos quotes, the way to understand friends.

“Well, I mean, it happened to me so much that I assumed it was normal by the time I started kindergarten, and did it to a teacher.” He says, casually stuffing his hands in his pockets. Pidge bursts into more laughter, and even Shiro hides a chuckle.

It’s all going to plan.

He places a finger on his chin and tilts his head, pretending to look reminiscing. “Of course, at that point, all the girls in the class were already on me. It was chaos, all of us were piled on top of each other, so the teacher never found out who it was that licked her hand. She covered my mouth in the pile, and it seemed like it was on accident, but I just know she had a secret agenda.”

Pidge scoffs, leaning back in their chair. “Sure, Lance, because the ladies love a drama queen with, count ‘em, five braincells.”

Lance’s cheeks burn with embarrassment, because, well, that one hit closer than he was expecting, and even Allura smiles, and it aches more than he had thought it would.

Regardless, he pouts, playing along.

( _Even if he’s not, and his eyes are stinging, and he’s a starving beggar acting as a stupid clown just for the taste of tomatos when they’re chucked at his face, he’s a jokester boasting of falsehoods in the pursuit of making someone else happy, even for a moment, for the absence of pain and despite the lack of love, how dumb is that? How dumb is he? To want affection and give it and to not even need validation in return, to keep it up? But he wants it, oh how he wants it, just as he wants a smile that doesn’t come at the expense of his own._

_Is he too selfish? How much more does he have to give to be enough?_ )

He can ignore himself for now. After all, the room is filled with laughter. That’s what he wanted, after all.

Keith is silent in the back of the room. But he isn’t frowning.

It’s enough.

( _He tries not to think about how it_ has _to be._ )

—

Does it count as freeing five prisoners, if it ends up with him locked in with them?

“Don’t worry, I’ve made a transmission to Hunk already. Hacked into their communication system,” Pidge calls out from the far corner, pushing their glasses up the bridge of their nose. Why do they still even wear them? Anime-shining-glasses moments? Maybe they’re actually still pretending to need them? Maybe they do need them? Aesthetic purposes, perhaps?

Oh yeah. They’re in a cell. He forgot that for a second.

They’re all stuck here because of information. Top-secret information, so secret that Lance doesn’t know what it’s about.

Thankfully, Pidge already sent it to the castle before they’d gotten tied up (not literally, they weren’t cuffed or anything for some reason. He suspects that they’d run short on handcuffs, and that they just really trusted their security. They shouldn’t have).

This cell is wet. And given the usual lighting conditions of Galran ships, surprisingly bright. Exceedingly bright. In fact, it’s always bright. According to Pidge, it’s during the Castle’s pre-programmed night cycle, too.

In his head, he’s come to the conclusion that it’s meant to mess with people’s minds to keep them prime for torturing and all that, so they’re vulnerable and have no concept of time. It’s certainly working, in his humble, exhausted opinion. Nobody could sleep comfortably in this wet (what with the leak in one of the corners of the ceiling), excruciatingly, eye-meltingly bright room.

Psychological warfare. Not cool.

And the lights are so bright that they’re warm, too, enough that they’d all taken off the top layer of their armor ages ago. He has no idea how Pidge can function enough to hack in this heat. He also has no clue how the ceiling is still dripping water, since the lights should dry up all of the liquid.

It’s like the summer, but not fun. There’s no beach. No air conditioning. No cold drinks. No ice cream. And definitely no hot babes in bikinis.

( _There’s Keith right in front of him in a skin-tight bodysuit, though-_ )

Uh-oh, here comes the repression. Nope. Not today.

Their host, the lone guard, the previous possessor of the tablet sitting in Pidge’s hands, is lying limp on the floor. Joy.

Keith, their oh-so-gracious cellmate, had thrashed them and knocked them out on the cell’s metal bars about a half hour into their imprisonment, five hours ago. No other guards have come back to change shifts or anything, which is surprising.

The… method of incapacitation used was certainly one way to do it, and Lance wasn’t complaining. ( _Not with the way his eyes had gone wild, and he’d done the weird thing he’s done since he’s gotten back, where he’d growled low in his throat like an animal, and how his back muscles had visibly flexed in a way that made Lance wanted to scratch it up-_ )

He’s a sane human being, who feels no attraction to people with mullets. He doesn’t.

The behavior from Keith had freaked out their fellow prisoners, though. They’d been there since long before Voltron had shown up for their mission, quietly huddled in the corner. All probably from the same alien species, and all very meek and shy. It’s possibly a shared trait among their people, for biological or cultural reasons, although he has no idea how that could happen. He’s not smart enough to figure it out.

They have longer, pointed ears, like Alteans, but that’s the only shared feature. Besides most of their faces, they’re much more furry. And it’s not like Galran fur. It’s not as fine and short. It’s more bushy, and mostly orange. And they don’t have pliable thumbs, somehow.

There’s a yellow stripe that runs down their forehead to their spine, made of slightly longer fur, too. He wonders idly if it’s natural, or they unanimously just decided to get some awesome dye-jobs.

The ‘Broiqchlomian’ (as Pidge’s violently acquired tablet reads out, from a scanning app of some sort) characteristics are rather strange, but they’re more intriguing than horrifying, which is more than he can say for some species. Their height doesn’t vary at all from around three feet tall, somehow, and even though one is purple, the rest have the exact same colored fur. Family, maybe?

“How long should the wait be?” Keith asks, from his seat leaning against the bars, parallel to Lance. His irritated, annoyed eyes only set Lance a _little_ on edge.

Okay, maybe it’s a bit hot-

Repression. No.

He’s been bouncing his leg for a while now, and Lance can tell how riled up he is by the tone of his voice. It’s always been more harsh and rough, but now it’s even more so. Plus, it’s combined with the gleaming Marmora blade he’s playing with; their fellow prisoners have been staring fearfully at it for as long as he’s had it out. And all that’s not even mentioning the constant twitch in his jaw.

To say the least, Keith is impatient.

“Not too long,” Pidge says, but they’re tapping much more furiously on the tablet now. And, well…

Something about the slowly darkening expression on their face speaks against those words.

“Give us your honest estimate, Pidge.” He makes sure to use his ‘mom’ voice. It’s patented, circa his dollar-store gold medal at a ‘mom imitation contest’ three years ago at one of those chaotic family reunions.

Thankfully, Pidge looks him in the eye. Now, it’s just a waiting game. A ‘don’t lie to me’ staring contest. The longest Hunk has ever lasted was ten minutes.

They crumble within less than a minute. Perfect, he still has it.

“Okay, okay!” They break eye contact, and pull their hand over their face. They start to fidget with the edge of their shirt between their fingers, the most common thing Pidge does when they’re nervous. It’s honestly hilarious that they think they don’t have any tells. “We… may have a delay in rescue plans.”

“How long?”

He sees as Pidge sways from option for option, contemplating the best one. The truth, a lie, a half-lie…

“Four more hours, ETA?” _The truth it is._

Keith slams a fist down on the concrete ( _and holy Jesus, did that crack a little?)_ , and the aliens jump. “I knew it,” Keith hisses, through clenched teeth. Wow. Okay, how does he de-escalate this situation...

He can’t, because before he can start, Keith abruptly stands up and starts pacing the room, running his hand through his hair.

Lance follows his small laps with his head, going back and forth like the slowest tennis match. He tries to communicate via his nonexistent telepathy to him, to maybe stop making them all anxious, but as he doesn’t have telepathy, it doesn’t really work.

“Let’s maybe not get ahead of ourselves,” he waves his hands around, as if to clear the air of the rising tension, and smiles nervously, praying that the wait won’t feel as long as it will be. Keith doesn’t do well with being cooped up for hours on end; this is already getting worse. “Maybe it won’t be too bad!”

He finds it a little funny that he’s attempting to play the optimist in this situation. It’s not like there’s any upside to this, but anything to counteract Keith’s rampant pessimism, he supposes.

“It’s already bad.” Keith turns to glare at _him_ , as if he’s done something wrong.

“I know, but like, do you have to be…” He glances quickly from Keith to the others, who are huddled even closer than before the outburst.

Keith’s expression starts to change, going straight from anger to regret like a Newton’s cradle. Cause and effect.

Sometimes, Lance wishes that he could make Keith understand what he really means. He understands that Keith has a lot of emotion to use. Like a bucket! A bucket full of emotions, filled with anger and sadness and boredom and everything in between at the moment. It can have happiness and excitement and love and all that, too!

It’s a bucket, though. And the only way he can use it is by dumping it all over the place.

He just has a lot of feelings all the time, about everything. Some call it passion. Lance calls it a bucket. Keith happens to have bigger emotions than other people, at times.

( _He finds it possibly endearing, really. Keith hates, loves, and all else with a fiery passion. The only problem with that is that Keith feels sadness more intensely than some others do, and feels anger more intensely, and it can be interpreted as him always being like that._

_Lance knows that Keith hadn’t had the best childhood. And so he’s learned that his big emotions are bad, and that he’s different and_ wrong. _But he’s not! He’s so much more than that! He’s more than his anger._

_Which is why Lance is so, so sad that Keith gives up on trying to be anything else, and defines himself with it._ )

He stops right next to Lance, and sinks from the wall to the floor.

“I… I’m sorry. You’re right.” At this point, Pidge has turned their attention back to their tablet, and the aliens have started whispering among themselves in a foreign, staggered language.

Him and Keith are only talking to each other, now, with hushed voices and terribly sharp lights beaming down on them.

He’s so sweaty.

Despite everything, he places a hand on Keith’s, and he notices immediately how Keith freezes up at the touch. He takes it back as soon as it happens, but Keith still seems in shock.

_Words, words, words, what can he say?_

“It’s okay to be upset, we all are, but you’re scaring them.” That wasn’t the right thing to say. Now Keith’s gonna feel like he’s been too mean. Which he has been, but Lance knows his well enough to know that Keith will beat himself up for that for _months_ if he doesn’t intervene.

Keith puts his face in his hands, and then in his knees.

Lance puts his arms around him.

He hugs him close, close enough that he can feel Keith’s breath hitch as Lance ‘forces’ him into reciprocating. Since he’s sort of leaning sideways into the hug, it’s slightly awkward, but then Keith straightens out his legs to make it more comfortable, and he can feel Keith’s heat radiating onto him, and it’s so warm… ( _Especially with how tightly Keith clutches onto him. He may or may not have inaudibly choked on his own saliva when Keith placed his own arms around Lance’s waist, and he’s able to reach all the way around to lock his hands around his wrists; it’s unfair!_

_But Lance can’t force himself to care about that, when he feels like he’s being protected, kept safe from the universe. And_ he’s _the one trying to comfort_ Keith _. Honestly._

_He still thinks that Keith might appreciate his presence, somehow, because he can hear his heartbeat as it begins to even out._

_He just hopes that he can help Keith. So he won’t feel like this again._ )

Are Galra warmer than humans, or something? Is their body temperature always higher, or is it the stupid lights? Lance has no idea.

There’s some song stuck in his head, something dumb that he absolutely cannot hum out loud, for multiple reasons. One, Pidge is a nerd and will recognize it immediately. Keith probably will too, but he’s not holding out hope. Two, it’s stupidly appropriate, considering where they are. Three, it’s absolutely not appropriate, considering where _he_ is, at the moment. Four.

It’s the Darth Vader theme. Whatever the name is. Imperial March? Doesn’t matter. They’re in a space prison, with a tyrannical dictator out for their blood, with a space princess on their side, and probably other things he can’t think of right now. But still.

He’s being held by Keith-

No. He’s holding Keith, really. He is. He’s comforting Keith. He’s just… also comforted. And it’s not related to Keith!

Either way, he’s hugging Keith and Keith is hugging him ( _it feels like a victory, somehow_ ), and he can’t hum the Imperial March theme.

He can’t.

“Is that the Imperial March theme?”

Quiznack.

Pidge heard him. Which means he must be humming it out loud, which means-

Keith snorts, and of course he would know that, he should’ve had faith in him, and he can ( _feel Keith’s breath on the back of his neck, and there’s something like a shiver running down his back_ ) see Keith totally binge-watching the series in the conspiracy shack of his. Probably while eating canned apocalypse beans. The kind only eaten by cryptids of the highest status.

“Wh-what’s an Imperial March theme?” Lance looks up, and nearly jumps out of his skin.

Barely a foot in front them is one of the aliens, kneeling for some reason. Specifically…

Well, one of the orange ones. No defining things?

Oh wait! A necklace!

The chain is so thin, it’s a miracle Lance had even seen it. A small leather-ish string, with only one bronze bead dangling off of it. Is it metallic, or just painted? He can’t tell without weighing it, but he has a feeling that it’s genuine. No evidence behind it, just a gut feeling.

In other words, he has next to nothing to prove it’s real.

“It’s a song,” he moves to pull away from Keith, but Keith’s already separating himself from him. He’s ( _so much colder, missing something, lonely_ ) grateful for it. Makes it ( _feel like Keith might’ve never wanted to be near him in the first place_ ) less awkward. “It’s a theme from Star Wars.”

The alien tilts their head, and it almost seems like a question mark has just appeared over their head, like in a cartoon. Oh.

He’s so stupid. He’s an alien, talking about a movie on another planet, and using music from it casually, as if everybody knows about it. Wow. How dumb can he be?

“I-it’s a couple films, about fictional characters in what my species,” he gestures to himself, “had imagined space would be like, before they’d gotten into it. They have good music in the background.”

They nod understandingly, and he doesn’t visibly sigh in relief, but the thought is there. He got it across, and considering how few brain cells he has (according to Pidge, he owns; count ‘em, five, which is probably accurate), it’s pretty impressive.

With the necklaced alien venturing out to explore the rest of the cell, the others have clearly followed suit. They’ve all _crawled_ out, and he doesn’t know if that’s just how they walk or what, really. It looks a little freaky.

Especially since they crawl pretty fast.

Fast enough that they’re all crowding around him and Keith, still kneeling for whatever reason.

He can barely see Pidge’s hand covering their mouth, shoulders shaking, behind all the fur clouding his vision.

“Woah, okay, um, what’s up?” The leftmost orange alien blinks up at him, innocent as a furry, three foot tall orange alien can be, and this one doesn’t have a necklace but it does have a bracelet. Same leathery string, with a bronze bead. The middle one has the necklace, and the rightmost one has… something like a belt? But with no pants. Just a string with a bronze bead.

Oddly enough, the purple one right next to them is wearing a necklace with a silver bead. Huh.

Bracelet, necklace, belt, and silver necklace?

“Uh, do you guys have names?”

Necklace glances over to Belt. Belt shakes their head, so they must have had some kind of conversation nonverbally? Either way, they’ve come to a decision.

Belt starts. “I am called-“

…

That was a terrifying noise. Like a full-size carrot thrown into a garbage disposal, but with the echo of an indoor hotel pool? They have a surprisingly deep voice as well, for a small creature.

“Although… I do not think your species can... pronounce it. With your single throat.” _They have multiple throats?_

At least they can all talk to each other coherently, despite the halting English. He’ll just have to name them himself.

“Yeah, I don’t think I can do that. Can I call you by something else?”

“What would it be?” Necklace should be a functional name, and Bracelet isn’t the worst thing ever. The second Bracelet can just be Junior. Belt doesn’t sound like a great name, but maybe...

“Cinturón?” Spanish for belt. He’s a genius. Truly, an innovator.

‘Cinturón’ makes an interested sound, a soft grumble ending with a higher pitch, hopefully appreciative. Lance has named many aliens during his time as a space-exploring Power Ranger cosplayer, and this is likely the worst option he’s given yet. It’s still better than Belt, so there’s that.

“Sin… Seen-too-rune?” Keith asks, turning to him with a furrowed brow. Okay, how did he even…?

“Cin-tu-rón.”

“Sin-tuh-roon.”

“Cinturón.”

“Cin-tu-rune.”

“Can you even roll your Rs?” The first thing he needs to be able to do. How does he even speak right? It might not always be necessary for English, but still?

“What do you mean?”

“Wha-“ He flails for an explanation. Metaphorically and literally. In the background, there’s something like a little girl’s giggles, but he’s too preoccupied with Keith’s complete lack of a basic grasp on like, half of Earth’s languages to even care about it.

“It’s like, like a cat purring. That sound. Like, with your tongue against the roof of your mouth? Like this,” he demonstrates. It’s how his mom had explained it to him, when he had struggled with it as a child.

Keith’s expression is a mix of curious, confused, and whatever the emotion is when you see a simple magician perform a card trick at the age of seven, and attempt to replicate it for the next five years, with varying results. Interest, something you’ll try doing for a long time and might get close to the original, but not anything that keeps you up at night.

Basically, he’s interested in getting it right, but just vaguely.

Lance inhales deeply, closing his eyes for a second. One more try.

“What about an easy one? Like… quiero.”

Keith raises an eyebrow. “Kyer-oh.”

“ARE YOU SERIOU-“

There’s blown laughter.

Young laughter.

A little girl laughing.

… The little girl laughing for Kuzco.

In an unintentionally synchronized movement, he and Keith slowly turn to the source.

Junior, the purple Broiqchlomian with a silver bead bracelet, is crumbled up like a ball of paper, in complete hysterics. The rest of the group just gaze fondly at them, and combined with the general differences in all of the group (silver bead, purple fur that might change with time, little girl laughter, etc.), it could mean that Junior’s the youngest of the four. Maybe they’re a family!

“Kyear-oh.” Keith says, careful and drawn out. “Cairo.”

Lance can absolutely not comprehend what Keith is trying to do. “We’re not in Egypt!”

The possible-child starts to cackle all over again.

Oh.

“I mean,” he makes awkwardly fake-aggressive eye contact with Keith, “Can you try and say regalo?”

He’s not sure that the wrinkle in Keith’s nose is entirely pretend. “Tre-gah-doh.” An A+ for effort, honestly. He tried an accent. It just… happened to have failed horribly.

“Those were Rs!” Thankfully, it’s still garnering a noticeable laugh out of the maybe-kid. Although…

They’re making fun of Keith, technically. He can’t have that.

“Hey, what’s your name?” The alien tilts their head in confusion. “What do people call you?” Hopefully that elaborates more? He wonders how attached these aliens are to their names, since they accept new ones easily and don’t recognize the term ‘name’. Even Cinturón had said that they’re called… whatever, and not that they’re named something.

“I am called-“

Yeah, it’s still incomprehensible. He can’t tell the difference, actually, between the two inhuman names. At least his plan is working.

“Agashoshagogashuashi?”

They giggle, and he hides a smile. “No! It’s-“

Gibberish. Guttural, inane gibberish.

“Shagoshashashagogishioishe?”

“No, silly! It’s-“

“Shasogoshoshashogosh. Come one, that’s it, right?” He hides a smile, watching the probably-kid be consumed with laughter. Honestly, it’s giving him some nostalgia from when he used to babysit Nadia…

God, he misses them…

“Noooooooo! You sound so stupid! That’s so dumb!” All of the aliens are laughing now (excluding Keith, but he’s half-alien so maybe it doesn’t count), and Pidge starts to grin behind their tablet, and, like.

Okay.

So.

He can’t take that seriously. It’s an offhand remark, and it’s about his pronunciation of something he shouldn’t be able to pronounce ( _wasn’t he so good at languages, though? He knows Spanish and English and Italian and Japanese and Korean and Russian and French and Samoan and Altean and most of Galran, and he knows he can’t say the names right, but shouldn’t he at least be able to get close?_ ), but it still kind of hurts a little bit. It’s not too far off from the sound they’re making. He doesn’t have multiple throats, it’s not fair!

It hurts, but he can get over it, he can totally get over it. 

( _And does Keith look so sad all of a sudden? He’s doing the broody, no-emotions thing, but that’s always how he is when he’s upset about something. Lance was just trying to make it better for him, so why is he sad?_ )

It’s fine. Nobody’s making fun of Keith, and they’re happy, and they’ll be fine as long as the team arrives soon.

He’s fine.

—

All he can hear is laughter. Unfamiliar aliens guffawing and chuckling and giggling. There’s a steady drip-drip-drip from the leaking ceiling, a burning light at his back, and a constant tension in his shoulders that stubbornly won’t go away.

Keith’s face reads of absolutely nothing, but his mind is another story.

_They’re just… laughing at him. Not at a joke, at him._

Like _Lance_ is a joke.

And, with an unconscious jolt, he realizes that this is nowhere near the first time. Lance is joked about daily, like he’s a one-man comedy show. And the worst thing about it… is that he acts the part.

Right now, Lance’s eyes are dim. Muted. And he hates the sight of it.

Lance’s eyes are meant to be bright, and expressive, and with a fire that most people don’t know how to look for. Blue fire.

An ocean, a sapphire, the desert sky at dawn, all things he’d attempted to compare them to, and yet none of them perfectly describing the color.

Lance, at his core and at his very foundation, looks something like blue fire.

Beautiful, and almost unrecognizably dangerous. So friendly, so gorgeous that you don’t recognize that it’s fire until you get burned.

He wants to reach out and hold it, capture it, in a way that he knows he never can. After all, Lance is Keith’s own lightning in a bottle. He can never shatter it, or keep it. It’s to be admired, and protected, never to be kept. Lance is too fleeting. He would never stay with Keith forever.

Although…

Lance doesn’t think he’s blue fire, does he? After that talk about not fitting into the team, the things he’d heard Lance say in that recorded video of the Beta Traz mission, the way he makes fun of himself…

_“This isn’t a participation game.”_

No, no it isn’t. But it isn’t a ranking game, either. Even if it had been, Lance would be nowhere near the bottom.

Lance doesn’t think he’s blue fire.

Keith sees him, holding the highest record in the sniper range and never mentioning it, and bragging incessantly about a big toy he won at an arcade at the space mall. Pretending to say an alien’s name wrong so they can laugh and correct him. Taking care of him when he trains for too long, of Pidge when they stop sleeping in favor of their computer. Keeping Keith sane when he had to lead Voltron, and spiritually when Keith had tumbled face-first into the void. Dismantling a bomb, and saying that he isn’t all that smart anyways.

Pretending that he’s so much less than he is.

Feeling like he’s terrible at fighting, that he’s simply comic relief.

Keith… Keith can’t allow this to happen, can he?

But what can he do?

—

Long after they’ve gotten back to the castleship, Lance can still hear their laughter ringing in his ears, like something haunting him. It feels like a sign of some sort.

It’s his own fault.

( _To play a foolish jester is to play a fool for the taste of tomatoes on your tongue, red clouding your eyes and staining your heart, piling in your lungs with every intake of breath and every shuddering sigh._

_To play a foolish jester is to be a fool._

_And yet, to play a foolish jester is to_ eat _where there is no food._

_A jester, but not left starving on the pavement like those who cave in to the weight on their shoulders._

_He is fed._ )

He’s still fine.

And yet, for some reason, he can almost taste tomatoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> keith and lance comparing each other to fire is my Jam.
> 
> fun fact: i’m trying to learn spanish through duolingo. partially bc i want to understand those spanish bits in langst fanfic. you can call me a sad, desperate idiot, but you better put dedicated in front of it.
> 
> mY wAy. My WAy oR tHe hiGhWAy.
> 
> translations go as follows:
> 
> cinturón - belt
> 
> quiero - (i) want
> 
> regalo - gift
> 
> teaser for next chapter: there’s a dirty laundry reference. guess what it is. i’ll try to have chapter four out soon, within a couple weeks at most. this fic has been half-written for the past few days, anyways.
> 
> comment if you want to, i always love feedback of any kind!! ty for reading!!!

**Author's Note:**

> ty for reading!!! pls give me feedback if you want to, and subscribe for more of this!! ty!!!!!


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